As the coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt global supply chains and wreak havoc on the world’s stock markets, it has reintroduced the ever-lurking ‘guns versus butter’ debate in the United States, where authorities are currently struggling to contain the outbreak, curb the increasing death toll, and deal with growing anti-lockdown protests. The main question being asked is–could some of the finances spent on military and defence have been better spent on welfare-related services like healthcare and social security? I argue that it is important to ask similar questions in India, where government expenditure on arsenal deals worth billions continue despite the glaring lack of public healthcare funding to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak.
In the US, the Pentagon budget increased by 91% in real terms between 1998 and 2011, and a post-9/11 global order has created a worldwide growth of 50% in defence outlays from 2006 to 2015. Moreover, these numbers exclude contingency operations, secret budgets, and spending on internal or homeland security. In fact, since 2001, the US has spent a whopping $6 trillion on wars in the Middle East alone.
But at the same time, US governmental healthcare expenditure has increased over 6-fold, from ~$1,832 per person in 1970 (in constant 2018 dollars) to $11,172 in 2018, accounting for nearly 16.9% of the country’s GDP. That being said, healthcare expenditure on hospitals, physicians, practitioners, and prescriptions has slowed considerably over the past few years, and the US’ big pharma nexus and focus on privatized healthcare proves to be more dangerous to its medical capabilities than its public healthcare expenditure.
Therefore, it is hard to quantify whether defence and healthcare spending actually have an inverse relationship in the US. But a 2018 research paper explored these linkages in the rest of the world by looking at the military expenditure of 197 countries from 2000 to 2013 using quantitative data from the World Bank’s Development Indicators (WDI) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The findings concluded that, over time, a 1% increase in military expenditure resulted in a 0.62% decrease in that of healthcare and that the trade-off between military and healthcare spending is far more debilitating in poorer and developing countries after accounting for variables like per capita GDP, democracy indicators, corruptions perceptions index, and population demographics.
In this context, it is worth noting that while richer countries like the US do not fare badly with respect to public health spending, emerging economies like India stand to lose a lot more in their quest to emulate the apparently successful US model of global capital accumulation and increased state militarization. But in comparison to the US, India’s public health expenditure in 2017-18 was a mere 1.8% of its GDP, and as per the 2016 Global Health Expenditure database of the World Health Organization, the country was ranked 170 out of 188 countries in general government health expenditure as a percentage of GDP.
Despite India's disproportionately low expenditure on public healthcare, the 2020 Union Budget was criticized for its ‘meagre’ military budget increase of 1.82%. In the same year, its healthcare budget, which was already only a fifth of its military spending, was slashed by 5.7%. At the country’s 2020 Defence Expo held in Lucknow earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the Centre’s five-year $130 billion plan to ‘modernise’ India’s military budget and introduce an arms and ammunition export business of INR 35,000 crore driven by homegrown military equipment and technology as part of the Make in India campaign.
And although the coronavirus poses various impediments to the defence sector–including affected supply chains, reduced demands, and a decrease in stock prices–India’s Ministry of Defence has continued to ink tenders worth billions with international and indigenous defence companies. In late February, when the contagion had just about started spreading in the country, the MoD signed a $2.1 billion agreement with the Turkish consortium TAIS to build and design 45,000-tonne fleet support vessels in collaboration with Hindustan Shipbuilders Limited for the Indian Navy. On 18 and 19 March–days before the national lockdown was instituted–the MoD approved a $5.25 billion procurement of 83 upgraded Tejas Light Combat Aircrafts for the Air Force, as well as a $117.3 million contract with Israel Weapon Industries to procure 16,749 light machine guns for the Army. More deals worth hundreds of millions are slated to be signed soon as well.
Of course, it can be argued that a pandemic should not impede a country’s defence strategies, especially since traditional national security threats still loom large. For India, the threat from Pakistan continues as their Prime Minister Imran Khan has quietly removed almost 3,800 terrorist organizations from his government’s watchlist. Furthermore, many of these deals have been in the pipeline for a long time and have coincidentally reached fruition in the wake of the pandemic.
But it is definitely worth questioning whether this is an appropriate time to be procuring shipments of military war equipment worth billions, given that the government’s relief fund of $22 billion is not even adequate enough to cover the real costs of the crisis. Have the past few years of unscrupulous defence spending not rendered India capable enough to handle existing security threats? It is undoubtedly worrying that the government did not consider the postponement of the aforementioned defence deals in light of the health emergency. And while it has ordered domestic defence firms to produce medical equipment in the interim, this does not make up for a lack of spending on medical infrastructure, low wages, and the abysmal working conditions of military and civilian medical workers at the frontlines.
Therefore, while affordable and accessible healthcare for all is a major point of concern in both India and the US, their challenges are incomparable. The US’ main issue is not a lack of funding but the systematic nonexistence of a government-funded healthcare system and a distressingly large political lobby against one that simultaneously supports the country’s large military-industrial complex. And despite their differences in approaching the issue, it seems like both President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee apparent Joe Biden share apprehensions about free healthcare and the financial costs of overhauling the country’s Medicare system.
On the other hand, in India, universal healthcare is implemented to a large extent, but COVID-19 has exacerbated the system’s already-underfunded medical infrastructure. Medical workers at the frontlines in government facilities are not only lacking protective gear and equipment but are working overtime and bearing the brunt of understaffed and unhygienic facilities. Again, this means that relatively safer privatized healthcare is only provided to those who can afford it. The government is now scrimmaging at the last minute to find ventilators and beds and is preparing railway coaches to deal with the crisis instead. Army personnel, too, have fallen victim to the virus, forcing units to call for minimum staffing and movement.
Hence, while acknowledging the economic and national security-related importance of the defence industry, it is worth questioning whether India’s conception of national security itself–which has traditionally been viewed at as synonymous with military defence–is sufficient in a world where health and climate crises are proving to be as costly to the world as transnational war. This is not to say that the Centre must completely divest from its defence industry and cancel all international deals immediately–that idea is both impractical and foolish. The armed forces and their bases have been an integral part of India’s response to the virus and our personnel are being deployed to other countries to assist them in their responses as well. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has also assured the public that the MoD has employed “robust” methods to insulate the armed forces from “adversarial forces”, especially at the Line of Control. This would lead one to believe that our armed forces are already equipped with the necessary capabilities to at least counter immediate threats, should they escalate.
But in a sector where procurement expenditure is, quite frankly, less essential than others during this particular emergency, cuts and redirection of a certain amount of funding towards strengthening public and defence healthcare infrastructure will prove to be far more fruitful for the country’s human security. A temporary halt on arsenal procurement deals and a diversion of some of those funds would ease the burden on both civilian and military medical personnel, providing more tangible relief than stockpiling aircraft and warships, at least in the short to medium term.
Image Source: National Herald
Should India Divert Defence Arsenal Spending to Its Healthcare Sector to Tackle COVID-19?
April 22, 2020
