GS Paper 3
Syllabus: Indian Economy: Budgeting/ Polity: Budgeting
Source: HT
Context: In the Union Interim Budget 2024-25, the Gender Budget witnesses its highest-ever increase of about 38.6%. It stands at ₹3 lakh crore, almost 6.5% of the total expenditure. The Ministry of Rural Development receives the largest share, followed by Education, Drinking Water and Sanitation, Health, Housing and Urban Affairs.
About Gender Budget:
Gender budgeting is an approach that aims to incorporate a gender perspective into the process of budgeting at all levels of government. The goal of gender budgeting is to promote gender equality and ensure that public resources are used effectively to address the needs and priorities of women and men. India has been implementing gender budgeting since 2005.
The Gender Budget is not a separate budget for women but an accounting statement highlighting allocations for women beneficiaries or girls.
Timeline of Gender Budgeting (GB) in India:
Gender budgeting leads to a more equitable future
Social factors
- Empowerment of women– through the encouragement of women entrepreneurship, skill development, and provision of credit.
- Achievement of social goals– helps achieve the sustainable development goal(SDG) 5 of gender equality.
- Reduced Gender Disparities: gender budgeting can be used to ensure that adequate resources are allocated to programs that promote girls’ education, improve maternal health, and provide women with employment opportunities.
Economic factors
- Efficient distribution of resources– targeting areas that impact women, and ensuring accountability. Ex- Nirbhaya fund.
- Care economy– gender budgeting accounts for the unpaid care economy, neglected in GDP
Political factors
- Promoting Women’s Participation: For example, gender budgeting can be used to ensure that women’s voices are heard and that their needs and priorities are adequately represented in the budgeting process.
Issues of concern:
- Insufficient allocation: Budget 2024 has allocated just 6.5% of the total budget for GB. The gender budget was, on average, about 5.2% of the total expenditure over the 2008-09 to 2019-20 periods.
- The concentration of funds in a few sectorsOnly a few ministries such as Rural Development, Education, Health and MWCD have received between 85-90% of the Gender Budget expenditure.
- Inefficient implementation: Though it is mandatory to release the GB, there are no accountability mechanisms mandating impact assessment of allocations for female beneficiaries.
- At State Level: About 16 states in India currently undertake GRB, however, the quality of statements produced, and allocation undertaken vary significantly by State, owing to inadequate training for government officials.
- Linked to schemes rather than outcomes
- Lack of monitoring: Monitoring remains one of the weakest links in the GRB work with no designated mechanism for monitoring it at the national level.
Way forward:
- Political Will: Gender budgeting requires political will from policymakers and government officials. Intergovernmental coordination is essential to achieve the best outcomes.
- Ex- coordination between MoWCD, MoHFW, and MoE
- Increase allocations for women-focused programmes:g., Sweden created a framework for gender-sensitive allocations at each stage of their budget process.
- Improve targeting:g., The United Kingdom introduced tax-free universal child care to make it easy for new mothers to re-join work.
- Create a ranking for state-level gender budgets: Akin to the ease of doing business ranking. Capacity building and technical support should be provided to State-level Gender Budget Cells
- Improve accountability:g., Iceland legally mandates that the Ministry of Finance ensure the Budget Bill lays out its impact on gender equality.
- The Development, Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO) (an attached office of Niti Aayog) has pitched in for the Gender Budgeting Actto the mainstream of gender-based budgeting across all ministries
Lahiri committee recommendations–
- Preparing analytical metrics for gender budgeting, and institutional mechanisms such as Gender budgeting cells at all levels of government.
- A platform for the collection of gender-disaggregated data– for informed decision-making.
- Outcome-based allocation– Ex- addressing specific goals such as improving mathematical abilities in female children.
Conclusion:
There is a pressing need to prioritise women’s safety, education, health, and workforce participation; which necessitates a significant increase in allocations and implementation of gender-based budgeting.
Insta Links
Practice Questions
Discuss the concept of ‘Gender budgeting’ and analyse its significance in the Indian context. (250 words)
