Defence expenditure excluding pension at Rs 2.74 lakh crore: FM Arun Jaitley

NEW DELHI: India’s defence budget received a boost of 6.2 percent in the Budget 2017 speech delivered by Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley . The defence outlay is pegged at just over 2.74 lakh crore.The allocation is about 12.78 percent of the total government expenditure of 21.47 lakh crore.The increase in the total defence outlay is down from the increase of about 11 percent last year. The Budget 2016 allocation was 10.5 percent over the allocation made for 2015-16.When taken without the pension component, the outlay for the coming year shows a 9.14 percent increase over 2016-17.Analysts had said an increase of 10 percent would be a necessity to deal with inflation and with the ongoing modernisation drive in military hardware.The capital acquisition component of the defence allocation for the coming fiscal is just over 86,400 crore, compared to about Rs 78,500 crore last year. However, the Defence Ministry had returned close to Rs 36,000 crore of the funds allocated to it for capital acquisition, Economic Times reported, signifying the difficulties in spending the allocated cash.