The Pakistani Spectator

According to the budget presented by the Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, India’s defence expenditure has been raised to Rs. 1,47,344 crore for 2010-11, a 4 percent increase from the last year’s Rs. 1,41,703 crore. The rationale being given by the Finance Minister for the increase in the budget was deteriorated security environment of India. It seems quite astonishing that India now using the internal mishaps as basis for the increase in the defence budget. Whereas, in reality India needs a huge defence budget to finance its defence deals with different countries such as Israel, Russia and America. Israel is poised to grab a major chunk of the whopping $ 30 billion that New Delhi will spend on defence purchases over the next five years. In the past three years, India had spent as much as $ 10.5 billion on military imports, making it amongst the largest arms importers in the developing world. India’s military imports are expected to reach $ 30 billion by 2012. India is a country, which bullies neighbouring countries and has no direct threat of aggression from any other country, so it can not justified such a massive defence budget.

The Indian Government is increasing its defence budget and is not bothering about what is happening to the common man. Two-third of India’s 1.1 billion citizens continues to live on less than £1 a day. The people living below the poverty line have nothing to do with the defence budget. The socio-economic indicators of Indian society do not allow India to have a huge defence budget. The poor condition of its agriculture, education, employment etc. has exposed its fake economic progress.

According to International Herald Tribune, ” there are too many signs of an over confidence (in India) that look more and more like hubris”. Paradoxically, only a false sense of economic growth is spreading throughout India notwithstanding the reality.  According to a survey conducted by the BBC World almost half of all Indians feel that their country’s economic “miracle” has done nothing to benefit them or their families. The survey revealed the growing sense of division in Indian society between the newly affluent middle classes and the socially disenfranchised rural poor.

The percentage of inflation is much higher than what is projected at the national level by the Government. For common man, inflation means rise in the prices of wheat and flour. The poverty-stricken people are committing suicides in the country at an alarming rate. The Indian Government failed to provide employment to its vast population. The proportion of the unemployed to the total labour force has been increasing from 2.62 percent (1993-94) to 2.78 percent (1999-2000) and 3.06 percent (2004-05). According to the Minister for Labour and employment the enrolment of the unemployed in the Employment Exchange in 2006-07 was 79 Lakhs against the average of 58 Lakhs in the past ten years.

The quality of education is also not satisfactory, which is indicative of Indian Government’s ignorance towards this sector. According to a study, 38 percent of the children who have completed four years of schooling cannot read a small paragraph with short sentences meant to be read by a student of class II.

The number of people living in slums in India has doubled in the past two decades. According to Indian Government, the population of people living in slums has exceeded the entire population of Britain. According to Kumari Selji, Minister for Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, India’s slum-dwelling population had risen from 27.9 million in 1981 to 61.8 million in 2001. The ballooning slum population is also an evidence of the Governments’ failure to build enough housing and other basic infrastructure for its urban poor, many of whom live without electricity, gas or running water. India’s largest slum population is in Mumbai where 6.5 million people live in tiny makeshift shacks surrounded by open sewers. Mumbai is also home to Dharani, Asia’s biggest single slum, which is estimated to be home to more than a million people. Delhi has the country’s second largest slum population, totaling about 1.8 million people followed by Calcutta with about 1.5 million. According to Maju Varghese of YUVA, an NGO that has been working with urban poor for more than 20 years, the rise in slums is due to the lack of affordable housing provided by the Government.

India is in negative growth mode. Industrial production is down for the first time in two decades. Export fell by 20 percent and at least 1.5 million officially-employed workers are expected to lose their jobs within this quarter. In the diamond polishing industry alone, 14,000 factories have been shut down; another 10,000 will follow suit in forthcoming weeks. Thousands of small-scale outfits supporting textile and machinery exporters have entered bankruptcy.  A worried market analyst at the Bombay Stock Exchange who was looking for additional measures directed at stimulating the Indian economy questioned why “the government failed to incorporate any genuine economic stimulus in the interim budget, and why the focus was on defence?

Apart from the industrial sector, the agricultural sector despite being the back bone of Indian economy viewed a decline. The agricultural growth of 3.2 observed from 1980 to 1997 decelerated to two percent subsequently.  This was due to low investment, imbalance in fertilizer use, low seeds replacement rate, a distorted incentive system and low post harvest value. In 1951, agriculture provided employment to 72 percent of the population as compared to 58 percent in 2001 and its share in GDP also declined from 24 percent to 22 percent in 2006-07. Similarly, the number of rural landless families increased from 35 percent in 1987 to 45 percent in 1999, further to 55 percent in 2005. The farmers are destined to die of starvation or suicide. More than 1, 00,000 Indian farmers committed suicide during the period 1993-2003 mainly due to indebtedness.

Mere growth of defence budget does not solve the chronic poverty and backward level of living norms of the people. In the last three years, the Indian Government has made the life of middle class more miserable. The high rate of inflation has created stress among the citizens and when finding no way out how to fulfill their basic needs they started ending their lives. The welfare of a common Indian does not guaranteed from the hike in the defence budget. There is a need that India should first provide basic amenities such as clean water, food, and housing to its citizens. The rationale on which India is increasing its defence budget is absurd. Firstly, India has no threat from neighbouring countries but it’s the smaller neighobours that are being threatened by the big brother. Sometimes it harmed them by blocking their water wealth and sometimes by creating instability through its intelligence agency RAW. Secondly, Indian claims of allocating good part of budget to fight insurgencies in North East and central India are farce. As basic stimulus behind insurgencies in these parts is under-development and neglect by the successive governments. For that matter, gentle way to deal with these rebel movements is by addressing their causes rather than fighting oppressed people with arms. There is a direct correlation between extremism and poverty in practice and the social, political, economic, and cultural discrimination faced by (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, who are among India’s poorest people) has resulted in discontented people resorting to violence for their rights. In view of these bitter realities a humble suggestion to Indian authorities would be to adhere to the dictum of Martin Luther King, Jr. that….. A nation spending more money on military defense than social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.