Government Budgeting & Public Finance

Gender Budgeting refers to integrating gender perspective in preparation, analysis and assessment of budgets and policies and translating gender commitments into budgetary operations. It is put into use by embedding gender-specific goals in fiscal policies by emphasizing on reprioritization rather than an increase in overall public expenditure or creation of a separate budget. It aims to achieve gender mainstreaming in legislation, policies and programmes to ensure that benefits and development reach women.

Significance of gender budgeting in India:

• It increases transparency and accountability of the budgeting process, as it highlights the proportional expenditure on both genders and the method/process of the expenditure.
• It will help in achieving SDG-5, related to achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls.
• Special attention would address female’s vulnerabilities and provide them access to resources and improve their performance on social indicators like health, education etc.
• Conscious efforts to create economic opportunities for women can help increase the female workforce participation rate, which remains low and consequently boost GDP.
• Integrating gender perspective into macroeconomic policy improves equity of the overall budget process.

The Centre and states have taken various steps to adopt gender budgeting, such as:

• The first significant attempt at making gender-sensitive resource allocation was the “Women’s Component Plan” (WCP) as a part of the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1997-2002), which earmarked 30% of developmental funds for women under various schemes of ministries/departments.
• India adopted the WCP as a budgetary strategy in 2004-05 and since then it has been institutionalized in the annual budget by incorporating the gender budget statement. This statement highlights the annual budget allocation for welfare schemes for women by categorizing them as “Women-Specific Schemes” (100% fund allocation for women) and “Pro- Women Schemes” (where at least 30% of the allocation is for women).
• A Gender Budgeting Secretariat has been placed in the Ministry of Finance, and central ministries and departments have been mandated to set up gender budgeting cells to initiate and take forward the gender budgetary strategy.
• The Ministry of Women and Child Development has come up with guidelines for integrating gender budgeting into beneficiary-oriented schemes.
• Many states and union territories such as Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Andaman and Nicobar islands, Dadra and Nagar Haveli etc. have taken significant steps to institutionalise gender budgeting.

Apart from these, there is a need to significantly increase the budgetary allocation for women, as funds allocated for Gender Responsive Budgeting are approximately 5% of the public expenditure and less than 1% of GDP. Further, careful analysis of gender-oriented schemes before launching and post implementation would go a long way in curbing gender inequalities and contributing to the overall development.