Gender budgeting: What next for India?

Time-bound goals needed for female school enrolment, gender-based violence, and health

Women constitute around half of the world population. All measures across the globe taken towards development, poverty alleviation and improvement of social indicators like health, education and gender equality are worthless unless policies are implemented specifically for women and girls. It goes without saying that unless the quality of life of this half of the population improves, we cannot develop as humanity.

 

Countries across the globe are becoming conscious of this fact and developing policies and programmes to address disparities between men and women. Global development organisations like the United Nations have also formed goals around this. For example, “achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls” is one of the key goals under the Sustainable Development Goals set by the UN, to be achieved by all member states by 2030.

 

Gender budgeting is a key initiative undertaken globally to address gender equality, essentially making the resource allocation process through budgeting more gender-sensitive. It embeds gender-specific goals into fiscal policies and in general into the public financial management stream. Gender budgeting is not about making separate budgets for men and women; it is about allocating resources and assessing the budgetary allocations through a gender lens. The benefits of this budgeting technique are well documented for equitable distribution of the state's resources, thus empowering women and girls.

 

Though there have been various initiatives in India on this front, the first significant attempt at making gender-sensitive budgets was when, as part of the Ninth Plan (1997-2002), a “women’s component plan” (WCP) was introduced. WCP earmarked 30 per cent of funds for all women-related sectors. The initiative got further institutionalised when the gender budget statement was first introduced in the Union Budget in 2005-06. The statement is divided into two parts: Part A constitutes details of all schemes where 100 per cent of the allocation is for women, while in Part B the allocation is 30 per cent of the total provisioned amount for the scheme.

 

According to an IMF study, there are over 16 Indian states that have adopted gender-based budgeting, which is a good achievement. But there is a long way to go before we realise the dream of an equitable society. There are gender budgeting cells formed under 56 government ministries/departments to identify gender-related goals and the approach to achieve them. The ministry of women and child development has also come up with guidelines for integrating gender budgeting into beneficiary-oriented schemes.

 

Despite all this, challenges remain in the implementation of gender budgeting. First, there is limited availability of disaggregated gender-specific data sets for all schemes and programmes under various ministries. In the absence of this data, it is difficult to study the impact of budgetary allocations on gender equality and hence take corrective steps. Second, the budgeting exercise is linked to schemes instead of outcomes, which is really the end goal of this entire exercise. For example, in the Budget for 2015-16 there are funds allocated for infrastructure maintenance under the ministry of health and family welfare. However, there is very little data available on the impact these funds made in reducing female mortality rates.

 

Third, there is an immediate need to conduct an assessment of gender-specific parameters and set goals accordingly. For example, it is important to understand time-bound goals for parameters such as female school enrolment, gender-based violence, health, labour force participation and income distribution. Fourth, a suitable authority should be created for gender auditing, to conduct an annual impact assessment of budgetary allocations for all schemes, thus bringing accountability to the process. According to Nabcons, the agency tasked with evaluating gender budgeting schemes under the Eleventh Plan, there is also a critical need for capacity building across government, corporates, public sector undertakings, NGOs and all involved agencies to apprise them of the need for gender budgeting.

 

While steps have been taken to mainstream the gender budgeting process at central and state government level, there is a definite need to deepen this process. Government should also consider moving some of the pro-women schemes from Part B of the Budget statement to Part A, to make them women-specific and thus increase the allocations. A national-level reporting platform should be created under the ministry of statistics and programme implementation, which will collect the disaggregated data by sex for understanding the impact and outcome of the gender budgeting initiative. The Central Statistics Office  should also be engaged for better data collection and analysis techniques.

 

Gender budgeting is a great tool for gender mainstreaming only if it is implemented in true spirit. Various initiatives by the central and state governments are a step in the right direction but can at best be described as a good first step in a long journey. Shared responsibility between the central and state governments would accelerate this process. 

 

Gourav Vallabh is Professor of Finance at XLRI Jamshedpur. Suraj Chatrath is a management consultant focusing on banking, financial services and technology