Decoding Gender-Responsive Budgeting

A budget that is gender-responsive ensures an equitable distribution of resources and promotes equality of opportunity for all people across gender including men, women, and children.?

Creating separate budgets for women or merely boosting funding for their programmes is not what gender-responsive budgeting entails.

Instead, gender-responsive budgeting aims to make sure that public resources are collected and distributed in ways that are efficient and advance gender equality and women's empowerment.

India began releasing a gender budget along with its Union budget in 2005. The gender budget is a project that uses a gendered perspective to track and distribute public expenditures. The emphasis is on enhancing women's welfare through legislative initiatives.

Since its beginning, the share of the Union budget allotted to gender budgets in India has been constant, ranging from about 3 to 6 percent.

The entire budgetary allotment for gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) in the Union budget for FY 2021–22 was reduced by 26% from the Revised Estimates of FY 2020–21. The gender budget was increased in the Revised Estimates for 2020–21 because the epidemic disproportionately affected women (accounting for 6 percent of the Union budget). However, in FY 2021-22,?the gender budget accounted for just 4.4 percent of the total Union budget. And in the ongoing FY 2022-23, it was at 4.33 percent of the total budget.

Despite ongoing discourse about the need to promote gender equality and implement schemes in an effective manner, there is still a long way to go for India. When it comes to budgetary allocation and utilisation of funds for gender equality, there are still certain gaps that India needs to fill.

For instance, in the case of education and schemes for the girl child, the last budget was a setback. The National Scheme for Incentive for Girl Child saw zero allocation. And schemes like Padhna Likhna Abhiyan too were not allocated any funds.

In fact, fund allocation and utilisation for women's safety schemes too have not been up to the mark. There has been fund underutilisation for various safety schemes under the Nirbhaya Fund.

Initiatives such as One Stop Centre (OSC), Women’s Helpline (WH), and Mahila Police Volunteers (MPV ), which are a part of the sub-scheme Sambal (under the Mission Shakti) are funded through the Nirbhaya Fund.

As per Demand for Grants, Rajya Sabha, 2021 and Annual Reports 2017-18 to 2020-21 of the Ministry of Women and Child Development which is the nodal agency for the Nirbhaya Fund, fund utilisation for these schemes has decreased over the years.

Between 2018-19 and 2020-21, OSC has seen a stark decrease in the utilisation of allocated funds, even though budget allocation for it rose in the same period from ?105.1 crores to ?385 crores. MPV saw no funds utilised from its allocation of ?5 crores for FY 2020-21.

Rs. 660 crore was released to the Ministry of Women and Child Development from the Nirbhaya Fund by July 2021, of which Rs. 181 crore had been used. This represents only a 27% utilisation.

As of 2021-22, Rs. 6,213 crore have been allocated to the Nirbhaya Fund since its inception, of which Rs. 4,138 crore have been disbursed and only 2,922 crore utilised, indicating that more than half of the total funds remain unutilised.?

The 2022–2023 gender budget's overall goal may have been to reduce gender inequality, but in practise, it has fallen short of setting priorities for important problems that women are confronting in light of the ongoing epidemic.

The restoration of India's economy in the post-pandemic era will be impossible if women continue to be marginalised, though, as it had already been experiencing a downturn even before the commencement of Covid19. It may be time for the Indian government to start walking the talk when it comes to promoting women-led development.

If you want to know more about budget-related issues and analysis, you can follow me as I have been and will be posting on LinkedIn regularly for the entire session.

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