The Hindu : Arms and education

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Saturday, Jun 08, 2002

Opinion

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Arms and education

By C. Rammanohar Reddy

Any society will be embarrassed when annual defence spending is... six times the outlay on all forms of education.

MANY IRRESPONSIBLE statements have been made over the past few weeks on both sides of the India-Pakistan border. In India, we have heard members of the Union Cabinet speak about flying the tricolour all over Pakistan, defence experts say a war will teach Pakistan a lesson once and for all and political leaders claim India can win a nuclear war. Just as high up in egregiousness is surely the observation last week by L.K. Advani that India has not lagged behind other countries because of its record in education and health, but because of its neglect of defence. And that the economist, Amartya Sen, is wrong to highlight India's failures in the social sector.

This is an outlandish observation to be made by the Union Home Minister (who sees himself as a Prime Minister-in-waiting) in a country which is home to the largest number of children not at school and whose health indicators are among the poorest in the world. It also flies in the face of history which shows that no country has been able to attain even a modicum level of development without first providing for a functionally literate and healthy population. But Mr. Advani's statement is actually an extreme manifestation of a deep and insidious set of arguments which are widely articulated by the strategic community in India. One argument is that India needs to spend much more on defence. The second is that it is meaningless to talk of human security (i.e. human development) without first ensuring external security. Put the two together and we have the intellectual underpinnings of the Home Minister's observation. But both kinds of arguments made by the intellectual guardians of India's defence sector can be contested.

The defence budget for 2002-03 is Rs. 65,000 crores. Is this adequate? Is it a burden on the Government? The experts point to India's current level of spending, which is in the range of 2.5 to 2.6 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), compare it with the expenditure in Pakistan which is over four per cent of GDP, to highlight the `neglect' of India's defence sector. We are told that India should be spending at least three per cent of GDP (a level reached in the late 1980s) and that under-funding has affected modernisation of India's defence forces.

There are many problems with such statistics and comparisons. One is the use of the defence-GDP ratio, which in India has increased but only very slowly since the mid-1990s. But Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen (yes, the same Prof. Sen) have shown recently that India's real defence expenditure, in absolute amounts, has risen by as much as 10 per cent a year since the mid-1990s, a phenomenal growth by any standards. Other estimates point out that while in real dollar-denominated terms India's defence spending grew by just 10 per cent between 1990-91 and 1996-97; the jump has been as much as 66 per cent between 1996-97 and (budgeted) 2002-03.

Second, the official Indian data on defence spending are under-estimates. They do not include funding of pensions and paramilitary forces under the Army, which according to standard international practices should be accounted for. Once these large items of expenditure and other minor ones such as allocating a small proportion of spending on nuclear and space research to defence are included, India's current level of spending turns out to be as much as 30 per cent higher than the official figure — taking it well above the so-called threshold of three per cent of GDP. Third, spending as a proportion of GDP may not be the best yardstick for judging the affordability of arms and armaments. A more appropriate indicator would be defence spending as a proportion of Central Government expenditure. Here, according to World Bank estimates, India's defence expenditure consumed 14.6 per cent of Central Government outlays in 1999, which was higher than the average of 13.8 per cent for all low-income countries. The picture then is of India spending relatively more than other countries in the same income category. And if we consider the more inclusive definition of defence spending, as much as 20.6 per cent of Central Government spending in 2002-03 will go the way of defence. This will be the largest single item of expenditure this financial year.

In the end, judgments of adequacy and affordability cannot be decided on the basis of numbers such as either the defence-GDP or defence-Central Government spending ratios. The right question really is not if it is enough or affordable, but how much of defence spending can be avoided. The answer to that will depend on India's ability to improve relations with the countries in its neighbourhood. But this is not something of interest to the defence experts and arms dealers who have a vested interest in maintaining and increasing defence expenditure.

The basic premise of the second set of arguments, which give priority to defence expenditure and implicitly deny that there is a corresponding cost borne in the form of lower allocations for social development, is that human development has no meaning unless external security itself is ensured. That is a truism of a certain kind. And the question that here as well must be first asked is: what is the best way to ensure external security? The temptation to fudge issues and use blackmail in public debate on defence expenditure is strong when Government spending on the social sector is grossly inadequate and the record in human development has been so disappointing as it has been in India. Any society (and its Government) will be embarrassed when annual defence spending is more than 20 times the yearly Central Government funding for health services, 15 times the allocation for elementary education and six times the outlay on all forms of education. This is the stark comparison in India which can be painted over only by making defence expenditure a sacred cow.

There are, of course, many ifs and buts in such a comparison. First, when total public spending by the State and Central Governments are assessed, the difference between social sector and defence spending does get narrowed. Moreover, since funding decisions are taken by the Central Government, it is quite appropriate to look purely at expenditure choices by the Centre. Second, less spending on defence will not automatically result in "a social dividend" in the form of higher allocations for public health and education services. Third, with a higher tax-GDP ratio it should in theory be possible for the Government to spend more on the social sector — and on defence. Fourth, since it is not just the volume of spending but about how the services are organised and provided, a higher allocation for the social sector does not necessarily mean that there will be a corresponding improvement in the quality of life. All these are legitimate caveats that can be posed in a defence versus human development comparison, but they cannot explain away the fundamental failures of the Indian state in providing basic social services.

The issue then is not whether Prof. Sen is right or wrong in emphasising the importance of education and health, or of our Home Minister throwing out altogether the centrality of human development in the larger development process. It is more a question of what it reveals of our political priorities when an emphasis is placed on militarisation and even the fig leaf of lip service to education and health is discarded.

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