March 01, 2007	Thursday	Safar 11, 1428

NEW DELHI: India raised its defence spending on Wednesday by an expected 7.8 per cent to nearly $22 billion for 2007/08, but the increase was not expected to speed up the modernisation of one of the world’s largest militaries.

New Delhi, the developing world’s biggest buyer of arms, has a shopping list of fighter jets, helicopters, cargo planes, missiles, radars, naval patrol aircraft and artillery for its 1.3 million-strong force.

However, the latest increase in funding was roughly in line with inflation and defence analysts said spending had fallen as a percentage of GDP due to fiscal pressures and larger outlays for health, education and the flagging farm sector.

This would ensure modernisation remained incremental at a time India’s security needs were multiplying and neighbours China and Pakistan were paying more attention to their militaries, they said.

“This increase is neither here nor there,” said C. Uday Bhaskar of New Delhi’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. “Arms purchase procedures are not as nimble and as quick as they ought to be,” he said, adding that this had resulted in part of each of the past three years’ budgets remaining unspent. “There is a need to address this lacuna now more so than ever.”

India, which has the world’s fourth largest military, embarked on an ambitious plan to modernise its largely Soviet-era arms in the late 1990s as it began to assert its political and military power in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region.

“India is sitting on Asia’s hotbed of jihadi fervour on one hand and has China to its north which is spending phenomenal amounts of money on its military,” said Bharat Verma, editor of the Indian Defence Review.—Reuters