Will Indian defence budgets ever fulfill India's vision
WHEN FINANCE MINISTER Arun Jaitley set the defence budget at Rs 2.29 trillion for 2014-15, Rs 50 billion more than what the previous government agreed in an interim Budget earlier this year, was he any closer to achieving self reliance? The answer is an emphatic no.
Jaitely has gone down the beaten path, hoping perhaps, that by the gambit of opening the defence sector up to 49 per cent for foreign direct investment, the technology practices in India will grow by leaps and bounds. One wonders how, because the real problems lie elsewhere.
These problems were spelt out in a research paper published two years ago by Dr Laxman Kumar Behara, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi. Behara’s paper clearly pointed out that the “root cause of India’s under-developed defence industrial production is its poor technological base and military technology in particular.” According to him, India has a low “technological standing”, and is rated at the numeral 20 as against China’s 82.8, the US’ 76.1 and Germany’s 66.8, to name a few.
In 2008, China exported 28 per cent of US imports of advanced technological products compared to seven per cent in 2000. His assessment is further strengthened by the logic that in India, we do not invest adequately in R&D. In 2006, the R&D budget was a mere 0.88 per cent of the GDP, as compared to 1.42 per cent by China, 2.12 per cent by France, 2.61 per cent by the US and a high investment of 4.53 per cent by Israel. This phenomenon permeates through all sectors including, defence in India.
In the Indian system, the budgetary allocation for defence confines itself primarily to revenue and capital outlays. It is a hackneyed path. Much to a measure of dissatisfaction, the ingredients of nurturing growth of defence technologies within the country are contained in the Defence Procurement Policy of the Ministry of Defence and are limited to providing for offsets in acquisition contracts for weapon procurements. This policy decision stems from the belief that the overseas equipment manufacturer (OEM) will fulfill his contractual obligation enshrined in the contract by disseminating technological processes to the associated team during the technology transfer activity.
This is seen as an indoctrination exercise for budding engineers who are expected to not only assimilate the knowledge but also have to acquire the potential to apply the knowledge at a later date for different applications. But this does not work even if the young engineer is sharp and vigilant, since he is only exposed to the mid-segment activity without any initiation into the preceding processes. Any extra initiative by the engineer is stymied by the controls that are either built into the contract or are enforceable under the laws of the mother state of the OEM.
In fact, the Indian experience, especially with the US industry players, has been full of auditing interferences where US government minions have encroached in our working freedom to ensure that their technologies maintain its sanctity and are not shared. Against such a backdrop, one is unsure about the take on signing deals with defence manufacturers from the US, which are being promoted by Secretary Chuck Hagel as he visits India. In the Indian context, the moot question will always be on how to speedily build our own potential for original innovation and support India’s defence industry.
When the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) was formed in 1958 from the amalgamation of the then Technical Development Establishment (TDEs) of the Indian Army, and the Directorate of Technical Development and Production (DTDP) with the Defence Science Organisation (DSO), our goal was to nurture the institution so that we obtain national proficiency.
Unfortunately, this route has remained piecemeal and could not lead to national requirements. In fact, we had even digressed during the Krishna Menon era when our Defence Public Sector Undertakings (DPSUs) were pushed into making coffee-making machines.
Despite DRDO’s valiant efforts in the subsequent years, there was no escaping the perception that it was being limited by the incapacity in technical prowess, especially in the private sector. Some DRDO ventures nevertheless nurtured development and some shining stars emerged, namely Larsen & Toubro, which with a largely Indian team and under guidance from the DRDO and Russian technologists, set new benchmarks with the development of nuclear submarine “Arihant” and several other weapon systems.
Same is the case with the much criticized light combat aircraft (LCA), which despite the formidable delays, allowed critical aviation technologies to permeate into India’s Indian Institutes of Technologies (IITs) and which could happily percolate to the engineer of tomorrow. It is believed that among the private industry, a segment of the work was also undertaken by a subsidiary of the Godrej group. These are the kind of links that will allow technologies to take deeper routes in the industrial workplace.
The volume of task is but huge and the only long-term approach would be to grant funds under the defence budget directly to technology institutes for promotion and development of technicians and scientists to commence, augment and build a base for defence technologies and not rely merely on other parallel S&T labs institutes to generate human resource. However, this will have to be a continuous feature and not a one-time step. Although not shown by the Ministry of Defence, we have precedence with the earmarking of Rs 35.44 billion for the Department of Science and Technology in the proposed budget. It’s a hike of 11 per cent over last year’s allocation of Rs 31.84 billion. The Department of Science and Technology has some of the country’s leading research centres in areas such as nanotechnology, materials science and biomedical device technology. The government proposes to strengthen such centres through public–private collaborations and generate the required human resource.