New Delhi: Amid a debate on finding solutions to Indian fighter aircraft requirements, Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh on Tuesday made it clear that there was no resource constraint and the country has adequate money available for its needs.
Speaking on the issue of acquisition procedures, the Defence Secretary said that the procurement policy was in many ways broken and steps would be taken to address it in the next six months to one year.
"India is on the cusp of great transformation. We have finally reached a stage where After liberalisation it took us around 16-17 years to cross the USD 1 trillion mark in GDP. It took us another 7 years to reach 2 trillion mark and another seven years in 2021-22 to reach the three trillion dollar mark. Thereafter we will be reaching 4 trillion in three years and we will add another. 75 trillion dollars to our economy every second year," he said.
"So, this notion that resources are not there and we are resource-constrained, let us throw it out of the window. There is adequate money available for what we need to do. We need to have the pragmatism to go for prioritised solutions that we need," Singh said while addressing the 21st Subroto Mukherjee seminar in Aatmanirbharta in the aerospace sector.
On the issue of the defence budget being only 1.9 to 2 per cent of the GDP, Singh said that this much amount also of an economy growing at 6-7 per cent was proving difficult to be spent entirely as every year Rs 3,000 to Rs 4,000 crores were being returned to the government unspent.
"Today we are spending just 1.9 to 2 per cent of our GDP on defence which can easily with 6-7 per cent growth rate. Even spending 2 per cent of our share is proving difficult to be spent because of lack if domestic absorptive capacity," he said.
On the issues in acquisition procedures, he said, "What is happening in our country is that our procurement policy, and I am saying this a dispassionate observer. I am part of it and we need to find solutions for it but our procurement policy in many ways was broken."
He said that we have not been able to do things in time.
"The timelines that we have given ourselves are too luxurious. Very basic things like preparing RFPs in time even before you go for an Acceptance of Necessity were not done. Thereafter, you all know that we have been goldplating many of our requirements. It's time to call a spade and spade and have a different approach.," the Defence Secretary stated.
