How India Allocates Its Defense Budget Among Branches, Most Of The Money Goes To The Indian Army

Dhir Acharya - Jan 03, 2020

Over the past five years, India's defense budget has nearly doubled, but that's still not enough to improve its weapons and equipment.

In July, the Union Budget for the Indian Armed Forces was announced. This budget is used in modernizing and upgrading India’s defense establishment while the country is facing ever-growing internal and global challenges.

With Nirmala Sitharaman as the new Finance Minister, whose last role was in the defense ministry, she would likely well understands the challenges as well as requirements of the armed forces. Officially, the total Union Budget total amount for the financial year 2019-2020 is Rs 27,86,349 crore. Out of this money, a total of Rs 4,31,010.79 crore is for Defence Allocation, with Defence Pension getting Rs 1,12,079.57 and Defence getting Rs 3,18,931.22.

Over the past five years, aka Narendra Modi’s first term as the Prime Minister, the defense budget has almost doubled. However, it seems that the money wasn’t enough for upgrading the weapons as a large part of the budget goes into pensions and salaries.

Of the total defense budget, the Indian Army gets the largest proportion, over 50 percent. The second-largest proportion goes to the Indian Air Force, the third is the navy, and the fourth is ordnance factories.

According to previous estimates by Business Insider India, the Indian Army receives Rs 167,593 crore, equivalent to 55.5 percent of the total Defence budget. Meanwhile, the Air Force would get 22.8 percent of the total budget, the Navy would get 15 percent, DRDO would get 6.3 percent, and OFs would receive 0.3 percent. However, the publication projected that the total budget was Rs 301,866.

So, applying this rate to the actual number, we estimate that the Indian Army has got Rs 177,006 crore, the Air Force may have got Rs 72,717 crore, the Navy might get Rs 47,840 crore, DRDO got Rs 20,093 crore, and OFs might have ended up with Rs 1,275 crore.

In 2018, India became the country that spent that fourth-most money in the military in the world, after the USA in the first place, China in the second place, Saudi Arabia in the third place, and with France in the fifth place.