The Sea India Keeps Underfunding: Maritime Strategy and the Navy's Shrinking Budget Share

India's articulation of its Indian Ocean ambitions has grown steadily more confident over the past decade, crystallised in the doctrine of Security and Growth for All in the Region, commonly known by its acronym SAGAR, first articulated during a 2015 visit to Mauritius and since repeated as the organising framework for India's naval diplomacy, maritime domain awareness partnerships, and disaster response leadership across an ocean through which a substantial share of global energy shipping and a significant share of world trade transits. India has backed this rhetoric with genuine activity: the Colombo Security Conclave bringing together India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Mauritius, Bangladesh and Seychelles on maritime security cooperation, an expanding network of coastal radar stations shared with littoral states to improve maritime domain awareness, and consistent participation in anti-piracy and humanitarian assistance missions from the Gulf of Aden to cyclone response across the region.

Yet the resourcing behind this ambition tells a more complicated story. The Indian Navy has for years received the smallest share of the roughly 1.5-percent-of-GDP-equivalent capital and revenue defence budget among the three services, typically somewhere between fifteen and eighteen percent of total defence spending depending on the year, a proportion that multiple parliamentary standing committee reports on defence have flagged as inconsistent with the maritime security ambitions the government itself has articulated, particularly given that the army's substantial share reflects the genuine and continuing burden of maintaining a large land border presence, including high-altitude deployment along the Line of Actual Control with China, a burden that is real and not itself a matter of misplaced priority so much as evidence that competing demands consistently squeeze naval allocation at the margin.

The submarine shortfall

The most consequential capability gap resulting from this resourcing pattern lies in India's submarine fleet. The Navy's own long-term perspective plans, going back to the 1999 thirty-year submarine construction plan approved after the Kargil conflict exposed broader defence planning deficiencies, envisioned a fleet of around twenty-four conventional submarines by the mid-2020s. India's operational conventional submarine fleet has instead hovered in the range of fifteen to sixteen vessels for years, many of them ageing Kilo-class and Shishumar-class boats commissioned decades ago and requiring extensive, sometimes fatal, refit and life-extension work, exemplified by the 2013 INS Sindhurakshak explosion that killed eighteen sailors during a refit-related accident traced partly to ageing systems and maintenance protocol failures.

The Project 75 programme building Scorpene-class submarines with French collaboration at Mazagon Dock has delivered vessels, with the sixth and final boat, INS Vagsheer, commissioned in 2024, but the follow-on Project 75I programme intended to add six more advanced submarines with air-independent propulsion has faced years of procurement delay, tender revisions and negotiation with German and Spanish shipbuilders that has pushed likely delivery timelines well into the 2030s. Meanwhile China's submarine fleet, both conventional and nuclear-powered, has grown substantially larger and more capable over the same period, and Chinese naval vessels, including submarines, have made increasingly frequent appearances in the Indian Ocean, docking at ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan in episodes that have drawn explicit Indian diplomatic concern, precisely the kind of contested undersea and surface presence India's own submarine modernisation delay leaves it less equipped to monitor and, if necessary, counter.

Aircraft carriers and the debate over their relevance

India commissioned its second aircraft carrier, the indigenously built INS Vikrant, in 2022, a genuine milestone for domestic shipbuilding capability and a source of legitimate national pride, giving India a two-carrier navy alongside INS Vikramaditya, the refitted former Soviet carrier acquired from Russia. Naval planners have advocated for a third carrier to ensure continuous availability given maintenance and deployment cycles that inevitably take one carrier out of service at any given time, but the proposal has faced sustained internal government resistance on cost grounds, with some voices within the broader defence establishment, including sections of the Air Force and cost-conscious finance officials, questioning whether large carrier investment represents the best use of scarce naval capital compared to submarines, anti-submarine warfare capability, and long-range maritime patrol aircraft, a genuinely contested doctrinal debate rather than a simple case of underfunding, since reasonable naval strategists differ on whether carrier-centred power projection or a more distributed, submarine-and-missile-centred sea denial strategy better serves India's actual strategic requirements in the Indian Ocean context specifically.

Indigenous shipbuilding's real but uneven progress

It would be unfair to characterise India's naval modernisation purely through its shortfalls, since indigenous shipbuilding capacity has genuinely improved over the past two decades, with an increasing share of the navy's order book, including destroyers, frigates and corvettes under Projects 15B, 17A and others, built domestically at Mazagon Dock, Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Cochin Shipyard rather than imported, reflecting a broader and largely successful Make in India push in warship construction specifically, even where submarine construction and certain propulsion and sensor technologies remain more import-dependent. This distinction matters because it suggests the resourcing problem is not simply that India lacks shipbuilding capability, but that budget allocation constraints and procurement timeline delays, particularly acute in the more technologically complex submarine domain, have slowed the translation of genuine domestic capacity into fleet strength at the pace the navy's own long-term plans have called for.

What closing the gap would require

A more resourced and coherent maritime strategy would require several specific commitments that current budget trends do not yet reflect: sustained, protected multi-year capital allocation for the Project 75I submarine programme insulated from the annual budget negotiation cycles that have repeatedly delayed similar programmes, faster resolution of the third aircraft carrier debate one way or the other rather than the current prolonged ambiguity that leaves planning uncertain, and continued investment in maritime domain awareness infrastructure and littoral state partnerships that have delivered genuine strategic value at comparatively modest cost, arguably the area where India's SAGAR doctrine has most closely matched its resourcing. India's aspiration to be recognised as the Indian Ocean's principal security provider is not unreasonable given its geography, economic weight and naval tradition, but aspiration sustained by doctrine and diplomacy alone, without the submarine fleet, and the political prioritisation of naval capital allocation, that a genuinely credible maritime power requires, risks becoming a gap that a more assertive Chinese naval presence in the same waters will be only too willing to exploit.