By Mubasshir Mushtaq
NEW DELHI
India has increased its annual defense budget by over 10 percent to $40 billion, Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said Saturday.
Jaitley made the announcement in his budget for the financial year 2015-2016 at the Indian parliament in the capital New Delhi.
India is one of the top ten defense spenders in the world. “This year keeping our defense forces ready for any eventuality, I have provided adequately for the needs of the armed forces. As against the expenditure of the current year of 2,22,370 crore ($36 billion), the budget allocation for 2015-2016 is 2,46,727 crore ($40 billion),” Jaitley said.
One crore Indian rupees is around $1,62,222.
He said that the defense budget hike would help in pursuing the Indian government’s "Make-in-India" initiative, a pet project of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“We are pursuing the make-in-India policy to achieve greater self-sufficiency in the area of defense equipment, including aircraft,” he said.
He said that the nine-month old Bharatiya Janata Party-led government had inherited a sentiment of doom and gloom when it took over, but now it was “India’s time to fly.”
“We have turned around the economy, dramatically restoring macroeconomic stability and creating the conditions for a sustainable poverty elimination, job creation, durable double digit economic growth,” he said.
The “pro-business” Modi government attempted to appeal to big business houses with a five percent reduction in corporate tax, while it disappointed India’s growing middle class by not providing any tax breaks.
The Modi government’s first full-year budget aims to revive India’s sluggish economy with a focus on growth to transform the $2 trillion economy. The finance minister said that India’s Gross Domestic Product was expected between 8 to 8.5 percent in the next financial year. The Indian minister also said that investments in infrastructure would go up by $11.36 billion.
Modi congratulated Jaitley for delivering a “pro-poor, pro-growth, pro-middle class” budget. “2015 budget will further reignite our growth engine, signaling the dawn of a prosperous future,” Modi tweeted.
Manmohan Singh, Modi’s predecessor, said that the budget had “good intentions” but it lacked a “roadmap.”
“It is one thing to announce intentions but another thing to convert them into a solid action program on the ground. My worry about the budget is it has good intentions but does not have an adequate roadmap to ensure that those intentions are converted to concrete tactical realities,” Singh told private news channel NDTV.
