Indian parliament tells military not to sit on funds

NEW DELHI (AFP) Apr 22, 2003
The Indian parliament Tuesday rapped the military for not spending its annual funds and urged it to speed up work on an indigenous engine for its light combat aircraft.

A parliamentary panel overseeing the function of the military in a report unveiled Tuesday said the relatively small increase in the annual defence budget for year starting April 1 was due to its failure to spend funds in time.

"The committee was distressed to observe the continued substantial under-utilisation of defense allocation, particularly in respect of capital expenditure over the last several years," the report said.

"The committee also notes with concern that a huge amount of 640 billion rupees, which constituted 30 percent of the total capital expenditure earmarked for 2002-2003, remained un-utilised," Committee chairman Madan Lal Khurana told a news conference after the report was unveiled.

The new budget announced in February was set at 653 billion rupeesbillion US dollars), a record low annual hike of just three billion rupees (62.5 million US dollars).

India had allocated a budget of 620 billion rupees in the fiscal year 2001-2002, but the defence ministry gave back 50 billion rupees saying it could not spend the amount in the stipulated period.

This was despite the fact India last year spent an estimated four billion rupees (83 million US dollars) a month to maintain hundreds of thousands of troops on the Pakistan border.

Khurana, who belongs to India's ruling BJP party, said the government needed to forge a five-year plan to streamline military spending.

The panel also attacked the government's inability to provide rookie military fliers with an Advanced Jet Trainer (AJT) to help them graduate from propellor-driven planes to fighter jets such as Mirage-2000 or SU-30 MKI.

The Indian Air Force, the world's fourth largest, has been waiting for AJTs worth 1.4 billion dollars since 1983, and is hoping local military aviation experts will develop a Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) to replace India's fleet of crash-prone MiG-21 jets.

The panel made a series of recommendations including that the tens of millions of dollars collected through a tax levied during India's border deployment should be placed in a special fund for the upgrade of the military.

The MPs' watchdog also expressed alarm at growing vacuum in the military command structure and said it estimated the the Indian forces were facing a shortfall of 16,000 officers.

SPACE.WIRE