With India hosting its biennial DefExpo exhibition early next month, in yet another new and inconvenient location, it is a timely reminder to consider the morass of Indian defence procurements, a tangled ball of red tape for India’s long-suffering armed forces.
DefExpo 2020 is being held in Lucknow, following recent one-off forays to the searing heat of a barren field with foraging cattle in the countryside near Chennai, and before that to the twisting backroads of rural Goa. One minister described the latter location as ‘a mesmerising backwater’, which of course is the natural place to hold an international defence