Approach:

Introduction: Define what is gender budgeting.

Body: Describe successes of gender budgeting in India, describe its limitations, and some recent government initiatives also to promote gender budgeting.

Conclusion: Suggest a way forward to further strengthen gender budgeting in India.

Answer:

Gender Budgeting is a strategy to incorporate a gender perspective in all stages of policymaking. It includes the gender-sensitive formulation of legislation, policies, plans, programs, schemes, resource allocation, implementation, monitoring, audit, and impact assessment of programs and schemes. It is being implemented in India since 2005 with the aim of promoting gender equality and women's empowerment.

Successes:

• Allocation of resources for women has increased particularly in key areas such as education, health, and social protection. For example, in 2019, the government allocated 7.7% of the Union budget to women and child development programs, up from 7.3% in 2018.
• Encouragement towards gender-sensitive policies and programs through gender budgeting, for example, this year’s budget has a new scheme for setting up a computer lab in the Kerala Armed Women Police Battalion for women’s safety and mainstreaming is being promoted highlighting increased gender sensitivity through gender budgeting
• Enhances awareness of gender issues with the need to address inequalities, and promote equality. For example, awareness towards transgender issues has been raised in recent times also reflected in the budget due to gender budgeting. The allocation for transgender persons in 2023-24 amounts to ₹6.4 crore under various schemes and has increased from ₹5.8 crores last year.
• It increases accountability among government officials who are now more likely to consider the needs of all genders.
• Improved data collection and analysis of gender-specific data through this process as it is critical for knowing the impact of policies gender-wise. This helps identify gender gaps and disparities in public spending and to design more effective policies and programs.

Limitations:

• Alleged lack of political will and commitment to commit resources for significant gender budgeting resulting in limited progress to promote gender equality.
• Resource allocation for women-specific schemes is declining. While the resource allocation for 90-100% women-specific schemes is 6.69%, down from 7.26% in 2022-23, that for schemes in which the resource allocation is less than 90% is 14.43%, up from 13.64% last year.
• Limited coverage and scope with few departments like education and health getting benefits but many sectors of the economy such as informal woman workers did not get benefits from gender budgeting. Finally, dedicated efforts to focus on vulnerable women are being announced such as for ensuring the social security of the elderly, ‘Prasanthi senior citizens help desk and victim support cell’ will be introduced by the police.
• Implementation and monitoring challenges of initiatives announced with the budget lead to limited progress in addressing gender inequalities.
• The lack of sufficient gender-disaggregated data makes it difficult to accurately assess the impact of budget policies on different groups of men and women, This makes it difficult to design and implement effective policies to promote gender equality.
• Limited participation of women in budget making process leads to a limited gender perspective during budget-making.

Various government efforts to promote gender budgeting such as the Ministry of women and child development has focused on

1) establishing institutional mechanisms and processes to undertake Gender Budgeting in all Ministries/Departments at the national and State/UT level and

2)strengthening capacities and building expertise across levels of governance on undertaking Gender Budgeting.

3)Developed a handbook for Gender Budgeting to further strengthen the process of institutionalizing gender mechanisms across sectors and across all levels of governance.

While gender budgeting has made progress in India, there is still a long way to go to ensure that budgets are fully gender-sensitive and promote gender equality. More work is needed to increase the allocation of resources for women and girls, to ensure that policies and programs are designed with a gender perspective, and to strengthen data collection and analysis to inform budget decisions.