India to be the Fourth Big Spender in Defence by 2020

IHS Jane’s Defence Budgets, Senior Asia-Pacific Analyst, Craig Caffrey said, “The economic growth that fuelled increasing defence spend in recent years faltered in 2012 and that’s what forced the government to re-visit its spending assumptions. Defence spend as a percentage of the GDP is actually projected to continue to fall through to 2020, but that will still allow for significant real growth in dollar terms. We anticipate that India’s defence spend will overtake France’s in 2016, [that of] the U.K. in 2018, and Japan’s in 2020. By the end of the decade, India is expected to be spending up to $17.4 billion specifically on the procurement of defence equipment each year,’’ as reported by The Hindu.

James Hardy, Asia-Pacific Editor, IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly, in his comments said, “India continues to be a major market for the international defence industry, with major investments in all three services and its strategic missile forces. While short-term budget cuts will have an effect on these procurements, India’s geostrategic position and the parlous state of much of its inventory means that it will continue to invest in new fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, howitzers, submarines and aircraft carriers, to name but a few of its many programmes,”

The need for the country to keep a state of the art defence system is crucial. India has been consistently matching its steps with the world and it continues to do so by giving defence the high priority as it should be given, for the protection and safeguard of the country.

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