Amid all the hype and hoopla about India having become the world’s fifth largest economy with a $4 trillion GDP and fastest annual rate of 6.2 percent GDP growth, it’s an unpleasant, but necessary duty to strike a discordant note.

GDP should be measured according to the per capita metric and not by way of absolute number. There’s a certain inevitability about the GDP of India with its population of 1.4 billion surpassing Britain which has 63 million people, equivalent to that of Karnataka, one of India’s 29 states. Moreover, India’s $4 trillion (Rs.333 lakh crore) divided by its population translates into per capita GDP of $6,500 per annum. Even this statistic that every adult and child in the country directly or indirectly receives a monthly income of $500 (Rs.42,000) is misleading. The reality is that 60 percent of annual GDP is hogged by the upper 10 percent of the citizenry comprising the 430 million-strong middle class.

Against this backdrop, a recent report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) revealing that India was the world’s largest importer of arms, armaments and defence equipment in 2023, makes — or should make — disturbing reading. According to SIPRI, in the period 2018-22 India imported 11 percent of global defence equipment ahead of Saudi Arabia (9.6 percent), Qatar (6.4), Australia (4.7) and China (4.6). In the interim Union budget 2024-25, the allocation for defence is Rs.6.2 lakh crore cf. Rs.1.20 lakh crore for education; Rs.90,171 crore for healthcare and Rs.3.5 lakh crore for rural development.

Admittedly education, healthcare and rural development are ‘concurrent’ subjects under the Constitution with the states also obliged to incur expenditure under these heads. But with the Centre setting the bar so low, total expenditure on education adds to less than 3 percent of GDP against the global average of 5 percent. Hence the poor learning outcomes documented by ASER surveys.

Therefore, the question which nobody seems to be asking is: should a country in which over a billion citizens live desperate lives in conditions of bleak deprivation, incur such vast expenditure on defence every year? Isn’t making peace with China the easier option in the broader national interest? It’s well-documented that during almost 200 years of British Raj over the subcontinent, arbitrary boundary lines were drawn and imposed upon Chinese-Tibet including the Aksai Chin region.

Instead of re-negotiating these lines in a bona fide spirit of give-take, successive governments in New Delhi have adamantly insisted upon preserving border lines inherited from the British notwithstanding several millennia of Sino-India peace, harmony and cultural linkages in the pre-Raj era. This foolishness has upended post-independence India’s national development effort and heaped misery on over one billion citizens. A bona fide reset of Sino-India relations is overdue.

Also read: China: CCP takes charge