The focus of the defence budget in the public domain is on the Capital budget and the Revenue budget only gets a passing mention and that too more for the allocations for salary and pensions because they get the lion’s share.
The Revenue budget has two components ‘Salary’ and ‘Non-Salary’. The salary component includes pay and allowances of uniformed personnel, civilians and auxiliary forces. The non salary part contains transportation, revenue stores, revenue works and other miscellaneous expenditure. The omnibus head ‘stores’ covers a wide range of items and includes ordnance, armament, electronics and engineering stores, ammunition, petroleum products including Aviation Turbine Fuel, airframes and engines and aviation stores, mechanical transport vehicles stores and information technology. In addition, it also includes rations, clothing stores and medical stores. Navy in addition has a category for repair and refits. All these items are absolutely necessary to ensure that the systems and platforms are fit for any contingency.
The total allocation under the Revenue head in this year’s budget is Rs. 3,64,747 crore out of which the largest chunk is for the Defence Services(Revenue) at Rs. 2,33,001 crore followed by Defence Pensions at Rs.1,19,696 crore. The increase from BE 2021-22 for Defence Services(Revenue) is 10% while from RE it is a mere 1.5%. For Defence Pensions the increase is 3% from last years’ allocation and from RE it is 2.4%.The service wise allocation of Defence Services(Revenue) follows a predictable pattern with Army getting the largest share at Rs. 1,64,898 crore. Navy has been allocated Rs. 25,406 crore and Air Force Rs. 32,873 crore
However, an analysis of the major elements of the ‘Non Salary’ component of the budget brings out how serious the issue is. It is also noted that while in some of the heads there was an increase at the level of RE 2021-22 but for BE 2022-23 the allocation has been practically kept at the same level as BE 2021-22 which means that even inflation has not been catered for. In the case of Navy both Repairs and Refits and Stores have seen a drop from and in the case of Air Force the Stores head is lower than the Actuals 2020-21. This is a matter of serious concern.
ARMY Actual 2020-21 BE 2021-22 RE 2021-22 BE 2022-23 (Rs. in Cr)
Transportation 3104 4100 4400 4100
Stores 20321 20332 22142 20383
Works 7860 8481 8819 8766
NAVY
Transportation 400 374 414 474
Repairs and Refits 2245 1556 1556 1556
Stores 7242 6054 6144 6054
Works 1814 1496 1495 1454
AIR FORCE
Transportation 990 1087 839 1087
Stores 12805 9429 12472 9679
Works 2506 2562 2436 2508
We hope that at the RE stage this anomaly will get corrected and the allocations for repairs and spares rationalised to meet force sustainability requirements. Aircraft on ground and defective ships in harbour require resources to be up and running.