MoD caps ammo annual budget hike at 10%

Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, May 17

Striking a balance between demand of modernising the armed forces and slow growing budget, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has come out with instructions saying an annual hike of up to 10 per cent will be assured for capital expenses meant for new equipment, weapons, ammunition, etc.

However, the forces will have to plan within the expected growth of “resources” and not come up with huge proposals that cannot fructify. The MoD has said the demands should be specifically based on needs for which the capability increase is sought.

The high-powered defence planning council (DPC), at its first meeting on May 3 decided that the forces will list out immediate criticality of weapons and ammunition.

The plan would be enforced from now till 2022, sources said. In the present fiscal ending March 31, 2019, the allocation for capital expenses is Rs 99,563 crore. This will see an year-on-year increase of 10 per cent, says the Ministry of Defence’s new financial guidelines.

Also the revenue budget (used for day-to-day running costs, salaries etc.) will get an increase of 10.5 per cent for the first year followed by 8.5 per cent the year after and so forth. The existing revenue allocation is Rs 1,95,947 crore.

The MoD clearly does not want to be seeing pruning down demands of forces that run into thousand of crores as then it gets adversely reflected in various parliamentary committee reports, giving a picture as if the government was not doing enough.

In other words, the three armed forces—Army, Navy and the Air Force—will have to prune the demands at their own-end, according to their own needs and not leave it to the bureaucracy in the MoD.

The MoD, otherwise, gets the lions share of the country budget, almost 12 per cent of the money in the country gets spent on military, running expenses and also new equipment like warships, guns, bullet-proof jackets, etc.

Despite this, a report of the parliamentary standing committee in March this year quoted Lt Gen Sarath Chand, Vice-Chief of the Army,  that Budget 2018-19 has “dashed” all hopes of modernisation of the force which is saddled with equipment of which more than two-thirds are “vintage”.

He added the marginal increase in the budgetary allocation barely accounts for inflation and the Army won’t be able to pay instalments of past purchases with the money it has received.