What good is a budget without gender?
Friday, 5 February 2010
Anuradha Bhasin
IT'S that time of year again, when the budget and budget allocations dominate the news and various interest groups scour the numbers to see what's in it for them. One of the most significant exercises in recent years has been to see how much of the money spent by the government goes to women and women-related programmes.
This has been done through the process of gender budgeting, which formally began in India as part of the Women's Component Plan (WCP) of 1997. In line with other component plans that assigned a certain amount of money to benefit some minority groups, the WCP stipulated that a minimum of 30 per cent of all funds or benefits in 'women-related schemes' should accrue to women. There seems to be no known rationale for the 30 per cent figure, but it laid the foundation for the more elaborate exercise of gender budgeting.
That is the good news. The introduction of gender budgeting by itself does not 'empower' women, but by highlighting how much of the country's financial resources are spent on women, it marks an important first step in moving towards a more inclusive growth path.
Since 2005-06, the government has been bringing out a Gender Budgeting Statement (GBS) along with its Union Budget every year. These statements have exposed the bad news, which is how little of the funds flowing into 'woman-related' schemes -- only around five per cent -- are allocated for women. The share of expenditure for women-related programmes was 4.8 per cent in 2005-06; it fell to 3.3 per cent in 2007-08; and from 5.5 per cent in 2008-09 it has risen marginally to 5.6 per cent in this year's Budget.
The picture gets murky when we factor in the muddled thinking behind what the ministries have included as "woman-related" schemes in their submissions to the GBS. This means that even this paltry amount (of five per cent) could be an overestimate of women's actual allocation. A budget analysis by the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) has shown that in the 2007-08 budget, the Ministry of Health allocated all the money spent on contraceptives to the GBS, even though the supply of condoms far outnumbers the supplies of all the contraceptives women use. Some of the anomalies have been corrected in this year's Budget. But allocations to all children and youth in various schemes -- like youth hostels, the National Service Scheme (NSS), the National Child Labour Project (NCLP), and the Indus Project -- is lumped together as spending that benefits women, rather than only the proportion that goes to girls.
Even at this initial and fairly superficial level of analysis, the numbers revealed by the GBS are an important first glimpse into gender-segregated allocation. How much more useful the exercise could be if the process were fine-tuned and more universally spread across all departments and ministries! More government offices are setting up gender budgeting cells, and some states have begun to analyse their budgets from a gender perspective. The latter exercise is vital to give us a more accurate picture of gender-segregated allocations, as most of the public schemes that directly impact on women's welfare and development are under the purview of the states.
It seems to be universally ignored that India's growth story is also predicated on the work of its women. They have become the backbone of Indian agriculture, which is the driving force of the economy. Three-fourths of all women workers are now linked to the land, compared to only half of the male workers. And yet, women face utmost difficulty in gaining title to the basic resource -- the land they cultivate -- compared to their male counterparts. The earnings of rural women have fallen between 1999-2000 and 2004-05, while the average wage for all working men has risen. And the much-celebrated success of the mainly women-dominated Self-Help Groups (SHGs) can lead us to forget that women are still largely excluded from formal sources of credit.
The gender budgeting exercise shows what paltry amounts of the already grossly inadequate public spending on health, education and other social sectors goes to women-related programmes. And there is no shortage of evidence to show that the whole country benefits when women's opportunities for education, health care, and employment improve.
Gender budgets are at best an accounting exercise; greater gender equality in access to public schemes and resources would, of course, have to look at how programmes intended to help women actually work on the ground, what kind of impediments women face in accessing these schemes compared to men, and so on.
Ultimately, the proposed move to an 'outcomes' approach to public spending - which looks at the ground-level changes in outcomes resulting from increased spending - would give a much more accurate picture of the efficacy of public programmes.
The complexities involved in the gender budgeting exercise, in accurately assigning shares to a specific group, indicate that it could be a long time before the process becomes streamlined and sophisticated enough to be an accurate measure of women's allocations. In any case, the exercise by itself does not ensure improved funding.
A far simpler and more effective budgetary device to help women immediately would be to emulate what has been done for another 'underdeveloped' constituency -- the Northeast region of the country. A minimum amount of 10 per cent of resources is set aside by almost every ministry and department in a non-lapsable pool of resources for the development of the region which accounts for only three per cent of the country's population. Given this, stipulating a minimum across all ministries and departments for the welfare of 48 per cent of the population -- women -- in a similar non-lapsable fund seems long overdue.
NewsNetwork/WFS
IT'S that time of year again, when the budget and budget allocations dominate the news and various interest groups scour the numbers to see what's in it for them. One of the most significant exercises in recent years has been to see how much of the money spent by the government goes to women and women-related programmes.
This has been done through the process of gender budgeting, which formally began in India as part of the Women's Component Plan (WCP) of 1997. In line with other component plans that assigned a certain amount of money to benefit some minority groups, the WCP stipulated that a minimum of 30 per cent of all funds or benefits in 'women-related schemes' should accrue to women. There seems to be no known rationale for the 30 per cent figure, but it laid the foundation for the more elaborate exercise of gender budgeting.
That is the good news. The introduction of gender budgeting by itself does not 'empower' women, but by highlighting how much of the country's financial resources are spent on women, it marks an important first step in moving towards a more inclusive growth path.
Since 2005-06, the government has been bringing out a Gender Budgeting Statement (GBS) along with its Union Budget every year. These statements have exposed the bad news, which is how little of the funds flowing into 'woman-related' schemes -- only around five per cent -- are allocated for women. The share of expenditure for women-related programmes was 4.8 per cent in 2005-06; it fell to 3.3 per cent in 2007-08; and from 5.5 per cent in 2008-09 it has risen marginally to 5.6 per cent in this year's Budget.
The picture gets murky when we factor in the muddled thinking behind what the ministries have included as "woman-related" schemes in their submissions to the GBS. This means that even this paltry amount (of five per cent) could be an overestimate of women's actual allocation. A budget analysis by the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) has shown that in the 2007-08 budget, the Ministry of Health allocated all the money spent on contraceptives to the GBS, even though the supply of condoms far outnumbers the supplies of all the contraceptives women use. Some of the anomalies have been corrected in this year's Budget. But allocations to all children and youth in various schemes -- like youth hostels, the National Service Scheme (NSS), the National Child Labour Project (NCLP), and the Indus Project -- is lumped together as spending that benefits women, rather than only the proportion that goes to girls.
Even at this initial and fairly superficial level of analysis, the numbers revealed by the GBS are an important first glimpse into gender-segregated allocation. How much more useful the exercise could be if the process were fine-tuned and more universally spread across all departments and ministries! More government offices are setting up gender budgeting cells, and some states have begun to analyse their budgets from a gender perspective. The latter exercise is vital to give us a more accurate picture of gender-segregated allocations, as most of the public schemes that directly impact on women's welfare and development are under the purview of the states.
It seems to be universally ignored that India's growth story is also predicated on the work of its women. They have become the backbone of Indian agriculture, which is the driving force of the economy. Three-fourths of all women workers are now linked to the land, compared to only half of the male workers. And yet, women face utmost difficulty in gaining title to the basic resource -- the land they cultivate -- compared to their male counterparts. The earnings of rural women have fallen between 1999-2000 and 2004-05, while the average wage for all working men has risen. And the much-celebrated success of the mainly women-dominated Self-Help Groups (SHGs) can lead us to forget that women are still largely excluded from formal sources of credit.
The gender budgeting exercise shows what paltry amounts of the already grossly inadequate public spending on health, education and other social sectors goes to women-related programmes. And there is no shortage of evidence to show that the whole country benefits when women's opportunities for education, health care, and employment improve.
Gender budgets are at best an accounting exercise; greater gender equality in access to public schemes and resources would, of course, have to look at how programmes intended to help women actually work on the ground, what kind of impediments women face in accessing these schemes compared to men, and so on.
Ultimately, the proposed move to an 'outcomes' approach to public spending - which looks at the ground-level changes in outcomes resulting from increased spending - would give a much more accurate picture of the efficacy of public programmes.
The complexities involved in the gender budgeting exercise, in accurately assigning shares to a specific group, indicate that it could be a long time before the process becomes streamlined and sophisticated enough to be an accurate measure of women's allocations. In any case, the exercise by itself does not ensure improved funding.
A far simpler and more effective budgetary device to help women immediately would be to emulate what has been done for another 'underdeveloped' constituency -- the Northeast region of the country. A minimum amount of 10 per cent of resources is set aside by almost every ministry and department in a non-lapsable pool of resources for the development of the region which accounts for only three per cent of the country's population. Given this, stipulating a minimum across all ministries and departments for the welfare of 48 per cent of the population -- women -- in a similar non-lapsable fund seems long overdue.
NewsNetwork/WFS