As the fourth largest military spender in the world, India has a huge defence economy supported by a budget amounting to nearly $67 billion in 2020–21. This book examines how well India’s defence economy is managed, through a detailed statistical exposition of five key themes – defence planning, expenditure, arms production, procurement and offsets. This book is based on hard-core evidence collected from multiple government and other credible sources including the ministries of Defence, Finance, and Commerce and Industry, Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the Reserve Bank of India. It discusses key issues such as the evolution of India’s defence plan; the feasibility of increasing defence spending; India’s defence acquisition system; and the recent reform measures taken under the rubric of the ‘Make in India’ initiative. Well supplemented with original tables and figures, India’s Defence Economy will be indispensable to students and researchers of defence and security studies, politics and international relations, finance, development studies, economics, strategic studies, South Asian politics, foreign policy and peace studies. It will also be of interest to defence ministry officials, senior armed forces personnel, military attachés, defence training institutes and strategic think tanks.

Probes the Indian Defence industry and the policies pertaining to it. Based on hard core evidence, this book identifies the key shortcomings of this vital sector and provides a detailed roadmap for the Modi government's ambitious "Make in India" programme to succeed in the defence production sector. It is presented in an accessible format to be easily understood by the wider strategic community.

India has long been motivated to modernize its military, and it now has the resources. But so far, the drive to rebuild has lacked a critical component—strategic military planning. India's approach of arming without strategic purpose remains viable, however, as it seeks great-power accommodation of its rise and does not want to appear threatening. What should we anticipate from this effort in the future, and what are the likely ramifications? Stephen Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta answer those crucial questions in a book so timely that it reached number two on the nonfiction bestseller list in India. "Two years after the publication of Arming without Aiming, our view is that India's strategic restraint and its consequent institutional arrangement remain in place. We do not want to predict that India's military-strategic restraint will last forever, but we do expect that the deeper problems in Indian defense policy will continue to slow down military modernization."—from the preface to the paperback edition

India has the world’s fourth largest military and one of the biggest defence budgets. It asserts its political and military profile in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. The nation has been in the midst of an ambitious plan to modernize its largely Soviet-era arms since the late 1990s and has spent billions of dollars on latest high-tech military technology. This handbook: canvasses over 60 years of Indian defence policy and the major debates that have shaped it; discusses several key themes such as the origins of the modern armed forces in India; military doctrine and policy; internal and external challenges; and nuclearization and its consequences; includes contributions by well-known scholars, experts in the field and policymakers; and provides an annotated bibliography for further research. Presented in an accessible format, this lucidly written handbook will be an indispensable resource for scholars and researchers of security and defence studies, international relations and political science, as well as for government think tanks and policymakers.

Chris Smith explores the evolution of Indian defence policy since 1947. He looks carefully at the domestic dynamics of Indian defence policy. This includes an in-depth analysis of the period 1947-62, which is often ignored by Indian defence analysts, and the performance of the defence industrial base. He concludes that India's defence policy is designed more as one aspect of the quest for great power status than as an attempt to aquire security at an affordable price.

Keeping in mind the necessity as well as the urgency of reform, this volume brings together practitioners as well as researchers on defence issues, on the key issue of defence reforms. The aim is not just to interrogate the status of reforms in current times but to also place the issue before a wider readership.

This book makes an original contribution to our knowledge of the world’s major defence industries. Experts from a wide range of different countries – from the major economies of North America and Western Europe to developing economies and some unique cases such as China, India, Singapore, South Africa and North Korea – describe and analyse the structure, conduct and performance of the defence industry in that country. Each chapter opens with statistics on a key nation’s defence spending, its spending on defence R&D and on procurement over the period 1980 to 2017, allowing for an analysis of industry changes following the end of the Cold War. After the facts of each industry, the authors describe and analyse the structure, conduct and performance of the industry. The analysis of ‘structure’ includes discussions of entry conditions, domestic monopoly/oligopoly structures and opportunities for competition. The section on ‘conduct’ analyses price/non-price competition, including private and state funded R&D, and ‘performance’ incorporates profitability, imports and exports together with spin-offs and technical progress. The conclusion explores the future prospects for each nation’s defence industry. Do defence industries have a future? What might the future defence firm and industry look like in 50 years’ time? This volume is a vital resource and reference for anyone interested in defence economics, industrial economics, international relations, strategic studies and public procurement.