Arun Jaitley increases defence budget by 5.8%

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has announced an increment in the defence budget to Rs 2,74,000 crore excluding pensions. From this amount, nearly Rs 86,000 crore will be used for capital acquisition.

Jaitley also announced that a central defence travel system is open for use and now soldiers can book travel tickets online. Other announcements included development of a comprehensive web based defence pension distribution system for defence pensioners has also been developed.

As per the experts, that atleast a 10 % increase was needed to deal with inflation and the vast sums required to modernize India's aging military hardware from Soviet era aircraft to outdated guns and body armor.