 Summary of this article
- 1.Twenty years on, India’s Gender Budget has helped mainstream gender tracking in public spending, yet there is a long way to go for ensuring increased women’s labour force participation.
- Experts flag weak focus on care work, labour force inclusion, safety infrastructure, and underfunding of schemes like Nirbhaya.
- Feminist economists, stakeholders demand a more inclusive, bottom-up gender budgeting process that prioritises work, care infrastructure, and informal women workers
In India, the Gender Budget is a policy tool used to analyse and track government spending from a gender perspective, to ensure that women and girls benefit fairly from public expenditure. Introduced in 2005–06, it does not mean a separate budget for women, but a detailed statement in the Union Budget that lists schemes where 100% or at least 30% of funds are meant for women.
The Gender Budget helps assess how allocations for sectors such as health, education, livelihoods, nutrition, housing, and social protection address structural gender inequalities, including unpaid care work, low workforce participation, and limited access to resources. By making gender impacts visible infiscal policy, it acts as an accountability mechanism, pushing ministries and states to design and implement programmes that promote women’s empowerment, safety, and economic independence, rather than treating women as passive beneficiaries.
While its impact has varied due to uneven implementation and limited outcome tracking, the Gender Budget remains a crucial intervention that has reframed budget-making in India by recognising that public spending is never gender-neutral and must actively address the deep-rooted social and economic inequalities faced by women.
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“From the beginning of the gender budget in India 20 years ago till now, we have been fairly successful in mainstreaming the gender budget as a tool to track financing for women’s empowerment. However, there is much emphasis on social protection schemes for women in the gender budget, such as PM Awas Yojana, etc. Though this is crucial, the schemes and funds that contribute to women’s labour force participation—their economic growth—remain lower in the gender budget,” says Mitali Nikore, founder of Nikore Associates, an economic research think tank. Nikore has also worked with the Ministry of Women and Child Developmenton several projects and consultations.
Throwing light on the nuances of the gender budget and its vision to achieve gender equity, Nikore adds, “India needs to look at programmes and schemes in artificial intelligence, technology, and research from women’s participation and growth perspectives. Funds and infrastructure for women’s participation in the labour market should be given more importance. Providing more working women’s hostels in tier-two and tier-three cities, crèches, safe transport, safe workplaces, and funds for lower- and middle-income entrepreneurs should be prioritised along with social protection schemes.”
Nikore also notes that earlier only four to five ministries would engage with the gender budget process. Over the years, the number of ministries and line departments engaging with the gender budget has significantly increased, which is a key success of the idea.
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