KARACHI: Government has allocated Rs1.37 trillion defence budget for the fiscal year 2021-22, which is 6.28 percent higher over the estimated allocations for the year 2020-21.
The proposed defence allocations are 16.1 percent of federal budget’s total outlay of Rs8,480 billion, while Pakistan Army’s budget is 7 percent of the total budget. The budget documents show that the defence allocations are 2.8 percent of the GDP.
The government announced defence budget of Rs1,289 billion for the financial year 2020-21, which later was revised to Rs1,326 billion. This year an increase of Rs44 billion has been made in the defence budget.
The major chunk of the budget, which is Rs481.1 billion, would be spent on the employees related expenses including salaries and allowances of defence services, Rs391.4 billion on physical assets, Rs327.1 billion on operating while Rs169.7 billion have been proposed for civil works.
Pakistan defence budget is over 5.5 times less than India’s budget for defence services which was announced earlier this year. In terms of US dollars, Pakistan proposed 8.89 billion dollars for defence sector against India’s budget of over 49 billion dollars for the year 2021-22. The Indian government allocated 18.48 billion dollars only for weapons procurement which is more than double of Pakistan’s total defence budget.