Atleast now you start thinking in the right way .. by trying to quantify what you get in return for all the "spending".
India is doing pretty well .. and isn't short of money either.
But we measure the outputs more carefully ... and the endeavour is to keep the defence spending low.
And sometimes cheaper effetive option is to buy .. than to re-invent the wheel. The usual practice here is to buy the design, but manufacture in India.
Most military equiments - and that includes fighters, ships, artillery, missiles, helicopters - are actually made in India.
The difference is that sometimes we buy design. (and that compares to china steals design, but it is questionable if it ends up cheaper to steal a half baked cake eventually, as the experience with "J-11" shows).
Off course, buying isn't always the cheapest option.. and what is increasingly being the trend -- that both design and manufacture happen in India. eg. Arihant class nuclear submarines, Advanced light helicopter, Arjun tank, HAL Tejas, an entire range of missiles from Akash to agni, varios ordnance factories. Many of such design-to-manufactures were not happening even 2 decades back. But now the trend is clear.
Then there is the stuff which reduces the cost of defence; design not offerered for sale; and we are quite far from realizing it domesitcally - the latest US transports.. they reduce the operational costs drastically for us. (and mind you, they are already counted out in the annual amount spent on defence imports which is still less than 10% of total spending of 40 bilion). They are cost reducers, and a wise decisions (note: china has no equivalents to these - it can't do it itself, like ourselves and embargo forces it to pursue alternate costlier options like building uneconomical roads).
Quite a decent bargain, compared to what china achieves, where corruption is one thing, but other thing is the embargo which makes any development in china costlier; some times prohibitively costlier. That is a big contributor to the outputs we see in comparison to the inputs in china.
It isn't a matter of money, even 100 Billion India can afford, but you need places to spend.
Scientists, Pilots, maintenance crews, oil, parts, setting up factories, training men to work, getting the right leaders, officers and etc.
It's not a matter of money, you can't just spent 100 billion if you got no where to spend. China spends 120 billion because we have use for them, what would India use it for? Buying a weapon is not the same as buying bread.
I think you have the wrong idea on what the accusation of China actually is. J-11 is a licensed fighter from Russia. The order was 200 to be built in China. However, by the time we finished 100, the fighter was considered useless and old.
The difference in opinion happens here. We made major modifications to the plane, to the point where the J-11B are more than 90% Chinese tech. The Russians are saying since it's based on the original J-11 and any modification doesn't use Russian tech doesn't generate money for Russians, and thus we should pay them.
J-11B is based on Su-27 which became J-11 UNDER LICENSE, however, all weapon systems are made 100% in China. The rest of the "copy" of Russian tech is this, we based the variants, J-15, J-16 on the original J-11 and J-11B, since they are variants of the J-11. The Russians are claiming ownership, though we had no help and all weapons systems installed are all new and NOT on the originals.
Checkout the dates those planes came out and just use common sense. Western military admits the power of our fighters. They won't go as far as to say it's better or equal, but they do say it's close. This isn't achievable if we simply copied.
Now to efficiency, the 100 Billion mark was only recently passed. At the turning point of 2000s, we were at less than 30 Billion. So our big spending days are only beginning. Look out for us in 2018-2020, when these spending truly takes effect.
I'm not sure what you mean about these US transport that reduce cost, but if railways, we got better ones than US, if transport planes, our Y-20 is going to number 200 in a decade, 20 per year.
Embargo is the thing that truly set in motion our military industrial complex. So while the embargo has hurt us, we are catching up fast. Truth be told, the US doesn't export the best tech to anyone that can't make it if they tried, IE Japan, UK, France, etc. India doesn't benefit from the US, not really.
Without an industry, a country also can't make adjustments on the fly and try out different models and systems to suit their goals. IE, Chinese built the largest active conventional sub not for combat just for testing of systems. Also the Type 52 DDGs, which went from A-D rather fast in terms of weapon systems, and without an industry, a country can't do this.
