India's Military Procurement Programs & Economic Capacity: Compatibility & Pragmatism

In a world of Realpolitik, each state in the world always looks for increasing its power; some for the purpose of their survival and some seek to fulfill their hegemonic ambitions. Having a huge population, territory, economy, and military, the states like India usually desire to establish their hegemony; therefore, it is not surprising that India wants to achieve a Great Power status in world politics. Although India has great numbers in each area of strategic significance it lacks qualitative capacity in terms of military strength where the advanced weapon systems are the backbone of a country’s military power. In order to fill this gap, the Indian government has announced very ambitious military modernization programs and is concluding various military procurement programs around the world bearing huge costs while the big arms-exporting countries are getting involved in such ambitious military modernization programs of India. Over the past few years, it has been observed that the Indian economy has not been able to fulfill the costs of military modernization programs and the gap between the estimated costs of military procurements and the budget allocation is continuously increasing. Therefore, this study hypothesized that Indian military procurement programs and Indian economic capacity are not compatible with each other, which shall have perilous effects for the countries involved in such projects. This study provides an analysis of Indian economic growth and its comparison with the costs of India’s military procurements and finds that the stated hypothesis is correct to the extent of compatibility difference between the Indian economic capacity and military procurement cost.