Context:

UNICEF’s representative hailed India for making great progress in making plans and budgets more responsive.

More on News:

• India today is looked upon as a leader in gender-responsive budgeting, especially in South Asia.
• Throughout the G20 Presidency, India has kept the spotlight on investing in the SDGs, and on gender equality.

About Gender Responsive Budgeting:

• Gender budgeting is a fiscal strategy to achieve equality between women and men by focusing on how public resources are collected and spent.
• GRB is good Practice: Helps to understand the implications of fiscal decisions on gender.Not a new budget process but rather integration of gender approach into all stages of the budget cycle.
• Gender Budgeting and the Budget:
  • The Budget is an instrument for fulfilling the obligations of the state set by the government in allocating resources.
  • Most governments have expressed a commitment to gender equality objectives and to gender mainstreaming.
  • Existence of Gap: Between policy statements and the ways in which governments raise and spend money.
    • GRB initiatives can help to close these gaps, ensuring that public money is raised and spent more effectively.

GRB in India:

• GRB began in India in 2005-2006 as a fiscal innovation, every year since then the Ministry of Finance has been publishing “Gender Budget Statements” along with the Union Budget.
• Gender budgeting in India encompasses four sequential phases viz. knowledge building and networking, institutionalising of the process, capacity building, and enhancing accountability.
• In the 2023-24 Union budget, the Finance Minister emphasised ‘nari-shakti’ (woman power) and shifted the focus from women’s development to women-led development.

Significance of GRB:

• Achievement of Gender Equity/Equality – The Constitution of India not only grants equality to women, but also empowers the State to adopt measures of positive discrimination in favour of women.
  • For example, Article 15(3) provides that the state may not prevent itself from making laws that provide special provisions for women and children, Article 42 seeks to ensure humane work conditions and provide for maternity relief, and Article 51A (e) imposes on every citizen by way of fundamental duty the responsibility to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women.
• Improving Literacy: The Government has been successfully running the Vidhyashakti program with focus on female literacy.
• Monitoring The Achievement Of Policy Goals: GRB is a tool to monitor the achievement of the goals of the National Policy for Empowerment of Women 2001 and other policy goals.
• Economic Growth: India has also promoted female entrepreneurship through initiatives such as Start-up India, the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana etc. These have had a positive impact on women’s control over resources and savings. 
  • The Bharatiya Mahila Bank Ltd, first of its kind in the banking industry in India and the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana besides promoting financial inclusion are emerging as a catalyst for gender justice and equality.
• India as Role Model: According to the UNDP, India offers a leading example of gender budgeting in the region. 
  • Other countries in South Asia including Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, also began working towards the development of a similar gender budgeting model.

Challenges Still Remain:

• Education: According to the World Bank India report, while male literacy rate in the country is at 84.7 percent, for females, it is 77 percent.Economic Opportunities: According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2021-22, only 32.8 percent of women between 15-29 years were part of India’s labour force in 2021-2022, while men were at 77.2 percent.
• Political Representation: Despite accounting for around half of India’s population, women do not have proportionate numbers in decision-making bodies.
  • Women comprise only 14.44 percent of the 545 members of the 17th Lok Sabha.
  • In 2022, only 14 percent of all Secretaries in the Indian Administrative Service were women.
• Bringing Concrete Changes: Falling short of providing a sustainable mechanism due to multiple factors including lack of commitment of fiscal policymakers, governmental bureaucracies, and weaknesses in the structure and implementation of the initiatives.  
• Low Budgetary Allocation: Despite having been in operation for almost two decades, budgetary expenditure on it remains a mere 4-5 percent of the total allocation in Union Budget 2023-24 and it also does not encompass some of the most vital schemes that affect women.
  • For example, the Jal Jeevan Mission has not been reported in the gender budget.
• Quality Gender Disaggregated Data: The government agencies who do not capture gender-disaggregated information from their schemes and programmes may not be able to assess the targeted expenditure towards the empowerment of women and girls.

Way Forward:

• Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action: It recommended devising mechanisms and taking positive action to enable women to gain access to full and equal participation in the formulation of policies.
• Gender Budgeting and Revenue Generation: It is also important to review the revenue generation aspect of the Budget.
  • For example, the Sukanya Samridhi Yojana would fetch a yearly interest rate of around 9 percent and provide income tax deduction to girls.
• Transparency: A transparent mechanism to explain how weights are assigned to various schemes leading to their placement in either part of the gender budget statement should be introduced.Gender-Disaggregated Data: Building gender-disaggregated data and integrating it with the outcome budget will help in better evaluation and focused allocation. 
  • It is also important to go beyond gender binaries and mainstream the transgenders and other communities into policy decisions.
• Institutionalisation: Further institutionalising GRB within all ministries using a comprehensive strategy that includes in-depth gender analysis, identification of priority areas, proper planning, and setting of short- and long-term goals.
• Expansion of Scope: GRB should also be used in those areas which have an inseparable gender component or indirect impact on women’s welfare. 
  • For instance, bringing uninterrupted power supply and water-on-tap to homes can reduce the time that many Indian women devote to unpaid household chores. 

Conclusion:

• Gender-responsive budgeting has proven to be an efficient tool to bridge gaps and achieve gender equality by allocating funds to areas where inequalities are more persistent. However, India must evaluate its GRB exercise not only to uphold its gender commitments but also to ensure that women’s concerns and needs are mainstreamed in fiscal policy making. 
• It is important to identify that fiscal remedy alone is not enough when it comes to addressing the socio-economic and structural needs stemming from gender. 

News Source: The Economic Times