Comment & Briefs

Nuclear force development is at present an attractive means for Pakistan to attract international political and financial assistance, while salving the paranoias of its security establishment. Improvement in the state-society relationship could reduce the domestic appeal of endless nuclear expansion as other, more sustainable, resources become available to the state for building economic growth and security.

In its most candid form, the fundamental message is that the growth in the allocation for defence, as indeed for other sectors, may not always be consistent with the past trend or as per the long-term growth rates indicated by the Ministry of Finance.

For almost the last 50 years, space collaboration has significantly remained intact between France and India. They have worked together on a range of issues from satellite applications, developing small satellites to earth system science and weather satellites.

“Innovation” has become a buzz word in recent science and technology policies of various countries. It has also been given ample importance in the science and technology policies and programmes of India, China and Pakistan. It is interesting to know on what exactly these countries are focusing in their recent science and technology policies and how these new policies and programmes will help them in social development, economic growth, technology innovation and pursuing national interests.

A GDP growth of less than seven per cent combined with the fiscal consolidation path that the Finance Minister has articulated in his budget speech means a lot of pressure on the defence ministry whose plan for current and future expenditure up to 2017 is based on past GDP growth rate of 8 to 9 per cent.

There is a need for an overhaul of the defence planning and budgeting systems to make them outcome oriented, which will lead to the development and maintenance of requisite capability through the defence forces as an entity over a specified long-term horizon.

In the larger scheme of things, fiscal prudence is a good trait and the reduction in deficits desirable, yet an overtly ambitious approach of reducing deficits into a number game may lead to developments that may hurt us not only in the security arena but in economic growth as well.

A National Counter Terrorism Head needs to be established with the single point authority for all CT activity and with authorization to muster all resources within the country. The authority vested in him will be matched by his accountability to every terrorist strike.

This year, India needs to be reminded that the situation in Sri Lanka has drastically deteriorated: the GoSL has weakened democracy, dismantled the judiciary and not followed through on any of the areas of reform that were called for last year.

While the anguish over the state of modernization of the armed forces, the slow march towards achieving the capability for simultaneous action on two-fronts and rather feeble power projection on a global scale are understandable, what is not understandable is the expectation that the outlays for achieving these objectives would increase exponentially, irrespective of the state of the economy.