Budgets allocated for India's military modernization have been steadily declining in recent years. India needs a national security plan based on its reality rather than its ideals, according to the writers of this book. Hard Times is a significant book that offers solutions to the nation's strategic problem. Since the middle of the 1990s, Indian national security policy has been founded on the premise that the nation would grow at a rate adequate to modernise its defence capabilities, enabling some level of parity with a rising China. The truth has been quite different. India has been vastly outperformed in both military modernization and China's phenomenal economic growth. The modernization of the Indian military has progressed patchily