India's National Defence: Defining Defence Reforms and Military Modernisation

As she charts her destiny in lifting her masses from poverty and backwardness India is also obliged to ward off incessant military aggression from her two near and most inimical neighbours. Resultantly she is compelled to spend as much as Rupees three hundred thousand crores annually from her overburdened national income to maintain the world’s third largest defence forces. In normal course of state wisdom therefore one would expect that such a humungous investment would be managed in the most efficient manner to get the maximum purchase out of every paisa. But alas that is not the case. What else could explain the contradiction that even with so much manpower hardware and funding committed upon her military power none of her adversaries are deterred from perpetrating acts of gross military escalation while indulging in brazen acts of sabotaging the Indian nationhood - freely and with immunity. It is also hard to explain as to why must India’s massive defence forces have to be left short of their due war wherewithal burdened with obsolete weaponry and hardware and saddled with overgrown and over-frigid organisations for higher (mis)management.