The general provisions of the proposed budget for the year 2024 state that the government intends to allocate 1,340 trillion rials to strengthen the defense infrastructure.
Therefore, according to this proposed bill, it is emphasized that in case this amount is not allocated, the National Iranian Oil Company is obliged to deliver crude oil or gas condensates to legal entities introduced by the General Staff of the Armed Forces, equivalent to the monthly difference.
This defense budget comes at a time when the examination of the budgets of other sectors, including employment generation, facilitating public access to medicine and food, and education, shows a lack of proportionality between the country’s actual needs and the allocated figures and numbers.
Experts believe that the Iranian regime, in its budget for the coming year, will prioritize the strengthening of military and security dimensions, as it has done in recent years.
This approach was also followed in the budget for 2023, and in December 2022, the “Iran Open Data” platform announced, after examining the budget bill for 2023, that the allocated credit line for “defense and security matters” had grown by 38.5 percent.
The “Iran Open Data” platform had calculated that this figure is 1.4 times the credit line allocated to general education and training affairs in the budget bill for 2023.
Last year, this platform had reported in a research report that the budget of the Prisons Organization in Iran had become three and a half times the total credits of the country’s five major universities.
Observers, relying on this approach in recent years and taking into account the political and economic relations inside and outside Iran’s borders, believe that strengthening the defense and security infrastructure is of higher priority for the Iranian regime than development and welfare issues. This is a matter that the Iranian society experiences in various dimensions in daily life, and daily reports of various labor protests are indicative of some of these dilemmas.
In a situation where Iranian citizens have been facing a shortage of powdered milk and infant formula in recent months, the Iran Open Data platform published a report showing that the budget of the Supreme Council of Seminaries (ḥawzah or madrasa for Shi’a) in Iran is five times the budget allocated for the provision of medicine and powdered milk.
The duty of these so-called religious seminaries is to educate clerics and send them to various regions of the country to consolidate the foundations of power for the Iranian regime.
The Iranian regime claims that it provides some of the expenses of families for powdered milk through pharmaceutical subsidies. Some reports also indicate that the government has assigned the provision of powdered milk to a factory in Turkey.
In a situation where the people of Iran are facing difficulties in obtaining medicine and even powdered milk, the regime spends its oil income on producing weapons and exporting them to countries in the region and engaging in its interventions.
