India to be the Fourth Big Spender in Defence by 2020

Bangalore: A country’s strength is gauged by the strength of its defence force. In today’s world as it proves to be true and wise to get better defence system, a recent report has speculated that India will be the fourth country in the world to spend a large sum strengthening its forces by 2020, as reported by Vinay Kumar for The Hindu.

As per the Information Handling Services (IHS) considered as the leading source of information, insight and analytics, it predicts India becoming the fourth largest defence spender by 2020, behind the U.S., China and Russia, surpassing France, Japan and the U.K. The Defence budgets has been calculated to be $65.4 billion in 2020 despite cuts announced by the government, caused due to the challenging economic and fiscal climate as per the IHS Jane’s Defence Budgets projects.

The financial obstacle is expected to decrease in the next three years, with IHS predicting India’s GDP growth to recover to rates of around 8 per cent by 2015, which will allow India to increase defence spending to recover from 2015 to 2020. With the current projections, IHS Jane’s Defence Budgets expects the Indian defence budget which includes the pension related obligations, to touch $55.6 billion in the next five years.

Also Read: Governments Fail to Curb Corruption in Defence: Survey