Saw a curious piece of information today. India buys 10% of Italian defense equipment exports and first thing that came to my mind was Agusta Westland scams.
India is the highest defense importer in the world, and spends about $46 billion a year. With this kind of spending you may think we have one of the best defense equipment in the world. In other words at least our borders are being guarded well.
I also read today, in connection with #MH370, India does not have any air surveillance radar at Car Nicobar, with the only radar being ruined post Tsunami (in 2006!) Somehow all these multi-billion expends every year was not enough to buy a radar for a critical sea lane's surveillance. Funnily, it seems a mobile radar is operated at Car Nicobar, and that radar is non-operational at night. Excellent information for the enemies to fix an appointment there.
Just a note: A generous sum of Rs500 crores was allocated for the One-Rank-One-Pension scheme for defense officers, after years of delay. Just juxtapose these humongous defense spending with the measly peanuts the governments took so many years to hand out. Also, compare that to MNEGRA and Food Security Bill which will cost the country upwards to 1 lac crore every year, that being a very optimistic number.
With such huge purchases, we are definitely on the list of top consumers for many countries, most notably Russia and Israel.
Here is how the spending across the world has grown since past few years:
Worldwide defense spends in 2008:
Note that entire South Asia defense spend is a "mere" $ 30billion
Now note the defense spend in 2010, just two years later, it had ballooned to $41billion, and increase in excess of 35% of 2008 expenditures. You can only wonder what was this for?
Worldwide defense spending in 2013.
Indian defense allocations have been steadily growing for past many years, and was at $ 46billion as on 2013.
Surprisingly, you would see a drastic fall in the USA's defense spending, though still far far above the rest. This is due to lesser number of wars as USA had fought many of them in past decade. The rate of decline in US' defense spending was the most since its Vietnam years.
Alas, a poor country spending such huge amounts is condemnable, and whats more there are just useless spends and cover-ups and scams and miscellaneous kick-backs for politicians. In short, the defense spends are politician's way of making money while the poor, hungry and needy starve for food and basic amenities.
What has these billions of spends done for India? Almost nothing, I would wager. Personnel are demoralized and discriminated against. The planes are still in ruinous conditions, the submarines catching fire or blowing up every other week or month, radars that do not work.
The moot question is where is the defense spending money going? And what for is it being used?
One illustrious list that no body in the world can dare to come close to matching is India's long list of scams. It is truly a daunting and sadly, growing list of scams.
Unfortunately, you will find a lot of defense scams in the list. And there are umpteen many yet to be uncovered.
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