Women in Agriculture

Lesson 31 : Gender Budgeting

Gender based resource allocation

Specific focus on gender based resource allocation is seen from the Eighth Plan onwards:

The Eighth Plan (1992-97) highlighted for the first time a gender perspective and the need to ensure a definite flow of funds from the general developmental sectors to women. The Plan document made an express statement that “….the benefits to development from different sectors should not by pass women and special programmes on women should be complement to the general development programmes. The latter, in turn, should reflect greater gender sensitivity”.

The Ninth Plan (1997-2002) adopted ‘Women Component Plan’ as one of the major strategies and directed both the Central and State Governments to ensure “not less than 30 per cent of the funds/benefits are earmarked in all the women’s related sectors. Special vigil was advocated on the flow of the earmarked funds/benefits through an effective mechanism to ensure that the proposed strategy brings forth a holistic approach towards empowering women.

The Tenth Plan reinforced commitment to gender budgeting to establish its gender-differential impact and to translate gender commitments into budgetary commitments.

Extracts from Tenth Plan:
“---the Tenth plan will continue the process of dissecting the Government budget to establish its gender –differential impact and to translate gender commitments into budgetary commitments. -----the Tenth Plan will initiate immediate action in tying up these two effective concepts of Women Component Plan and Gender Budgeting to play a complementary role to each other and thus ensure both preventive and post facto action in enabling women to receive their rightful share from all the women – related general development sectors. ”

The Department of Women and Child Development as the nodal Department in GOI for gender budgeting took the initiative in 2004, of defining a broader strategic framework for gender budgeting covering a wide gamut of activities which collectively would contribute to strengthen the gender budgeting initiative. This is given below:

Mission Statement- “Budgeting for Gender Equity”
Framework of activities

• Quantification of allocation of resources for women in the Union, States and Local Administration budgets and expenditure thereof.
• Refining and standardizing methodology and development of tools.
• Trend Analysis
• Analysis of change in pattern, shift in priorities in allocation across clusters of services etc
• Variations in allocation of resources and actual expenditure
• Adherence to physical targets

Gender Audit of policies of the Government - monetary, fiscal, trade etc. at the Centre and State levels

• Research and micro studies to guide macro policies like credit policy, taxes etc
• Identification of gender impact of policies/interventions viewed as gender neutral
• Micro studies to identify need for affirmative action in favour of women towards correcting gender imbalances

Impact assessment of various schemes in the Union and State budgets

• Micro studies on incidence of benefits
• Analysis of cost of delivery of services
• Analyzing programmes, strategies, interventions and policy initiatives

From the perspective of their impact on status of women as reflected in important Macro Indicators like literacy, MMR, participation in work force E.g. analysis of substance and content of various interventions directed at health of women and correlate the same with indicator like MMR to establish need for corrective action in formulation of scheme/ approach.

Institutionalizing the generation and collection of gender disaggregated Data

• Developing MIS for feed back from implementing agencies
• Inclusion of new parameters in data collection in Census and surveys by NSO, CSO etc

Consultations and Capacity building

• Collation of research and exchange of best practices
• Developing methodologies and tools for dissemination
• Forums and Partnerships amongst experts and stakeholders.

Review of decision making processes to establish gender equity in Participation:

• Review of extent of participation of women in decision making processes and to establish processes and models aimed at gender equity in decision making and greater participation of women.
• Formulation and reflection of satellite accounts to capture the contribution of women to the economy by way of their activities in areas that go unreported like care economy, unpaid work in rearing domestic animals etc.
• Formal institutionalization of the gender budgeting exercise in the annual budgeting process of the Government of India has taken place with the inclusion of a gender budgeting statement in the Union Budget 2005-06.

Approaches to Gender Budgeting Initiatives in India
A wide variety of women empowering initiatives have been taken up over the last few decades in the government and civil society.

A few milestones in the context of gender budgeting are briefly mentioned below to enable reflection on the different approaches to gender budgeting:

• The Government of India adopted the Women’s Component Plan approach for ensuring gender sensitive resource allocation. Reviewing the performance of the WCP during the Ninth Plan, the 10th Plan document indicates that 39% of the GBS of 15 women related Ministries/Departments flowed to women under the Women’s Component Plan.
• The first formal exercise in gender budgeting at the national level was undertaken by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) when they analyzed the Union Budget.
• The study highlighted the low proportion of women related allocation in the Union Budget and the tendency for revised allocations being less than budgeted projections.
• Studies in selected states were commissioned by Department of Women and Child Development through the National Institute of Public Cooperation and Child Development using the same model.
• The Department of Women and Child Development also commissioned a study on gender analysis of budgets of all States for the period 1993-94 to 2002-03 so as to generate a time series data on budgeted expenditure for women by State Governments for the years 1993-94 to 2002-03.

In this report, the programmes for women have been classified under 5 sectors :

1. Education and Training – General education of girls above senior secondary level, training of women in technical education, extension work, etc.
2. Women in Need – pension/financial assistance for destitute/handicapped women and widows and their children for purposes like marriage/education, etc., shelter homes, rehabilitation of prostitutes, etc.
3. Health – maternity and child care, hospitals for women, community health programme for women, etc.
4. Women Empowerment programmes – working women hostels, self-help group schemes, women cooperative banks, etc.
5. Miscellaneous measures, apart from highlighting that more than 50% of expenditure on women is from the state budgets, the study also brought out significant variations in interstate positions on trend of expenditure on women when seen in correlation with female population.
   • At the state level, the State Government of Karnataka was a pioneer in gender budgeting of public expenditure. The state undertook earmarking resources for women in most sectors. States like Kerala and Tamil Nadu have achieved a high degree of progress in gender related indicators on literacy, health, employment etc. through introduction of several successful gender related programmes (especially through the self help group movement).
   • The initiatives taken in the last two years by Ministry of Finance >have reinforced the commitment of the Government to adopt gender budgeting as a tool for women’s empowerment.
   • Recognizing the need to spread gender budgeting initiatives in the entire Government machinery, the inter Departmental committee recommended that all Departments establish a ‘Gender Budgeting Cell. To begin with eighteen Departments were asked to reflect scheme-wise physical targets and expenditure benefiting women in their Performance Budgets for 2004-05.
   • The Department of Women and Child Development has drawn up detailed guidelines on gender budgeting initiatives for these cells and workshops have been organized for dissemination of gender budgeting practices and initiatives.