Highlight 9/2022 – Gender Responsive Budgeting: the Indian context
Sruthee Sankara Ram, 23 February 2022
Persisting gender gaps across the world have been exacerbated by the pandemic and the resultant economic crisis. In light of this, it is important to examine public expenditure from a gender perspective to ensure steady progress in bridging economic inequalities. One way to systematically promote and ensure equality in public expenditure is to employ a fiscal mechanism called Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB). The objective of GRB is to integrate gender perspectives with all aspects of budgeting, right from formulation to social (gender) audit of the budget after it is passed.
The Government of India introduced a Gender Budget Statement (GBS) in the year 2005-06 constituting two parts: Part A that presents women-specific schemes that have 100% allocation for women (such as widow pension scheme) and Part B with other welfare schemes that have 30% allocation for women (such as rural employment scheme). Since then, the GBS is presented annually along with the Union Budget of India. Subsequently, a few State governments have also started to present a Gender Budget along with their State Budgets.
The Gender Budget has declined from 4.72% of the total expenditure in 2020 during the pre-pandemic times to 4.3% in 2022. It is observed that while the allocation has increased in absolute terms from the previous years, the total allocation is under 5% of the entire Union Budget and under 1% of the country’s GDP. Moreover, the allocation to Part B expenditures remains unfairly high, i.e. 84% of the gender budget is for schemes with 30% allocation for women. This implies that there are not enough schemes that focus entirely on women (gender) development and hence women have to depend on the subsidiary allocations of other schemes. Gender Budget has not been distributed across a diverse portfolio, with 5 ministries taking up almost 87% of the entire Gender Budget.1 This disproportionate distribution essentially means that the purpose of GRB is yet to be fully met with, as it requires allocation for women-centric schemes widely across all/most ministries, in order to stimulate women’s participation across all domains.
With no proper institutions in place to ensure that these funds are spent for earmarked purposes and without any gender auditing, the allocated amounts do not benefit the targeted population. In order to make the GBS more outcome-oriented, the Finance Minister had mentioned the constitution of an expert committee to perform a gender audit. Three years later, this announcement remains only on paper and the gender aspect of public expenditure continues to be deprived of attention. Development organizations such as the World Bank have suggested for GRB to be informed by data analysis methods such as gender disaggregated benefit-incidence analysis, which India has not employed in its Budget Analysis till now. It also acutely lacks dedicated funds for people with other gender identities and people from LGBTQIA+ communities.
The status of GRB in India is a major cause for concern as studies from across the world show that the gender gap has widened during the pandemic and that “closing the global gender gap has increased by a generation from 99.5 years to 135.6 years” (WEF). Out of 153 countries, India has slipped to the 140th position in the Global Gender Gap Report by the WEF in 2021, from the earlier position of 112th position in 2020. Although India has adopted GRB and has been consistently presenting a GBS, it is important to note that it is not a mere budgetary aggregation exercise for bureaucrats, but a way to mainstream gender perspectives for an inclusive, equal future for all.
Notes:
1 Data on Indian Budget 2022-23 retrieved from https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/ and Gender Budget https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/doc/eb/stat13.pdf .
Pic Credits: Kosovo Women’s Network https://womensnetwork.org/kwn-with-recommendations-for-municipal-budget-for-2022-implement-gender-responsive-budgeting/
Sruthee Sankara Ram, Highlight 9/2022 – Gender Responsive Budgeting: the Indian context, 23 February 2022, available at www.meig.ch
The views expressed in the MEIG Highlights are personal to the author and neither reflect the positions of the MEIG Programme nor those of the University of Geneva.