| The annual
budget has come and gone, a much reported news event full of
headlines, analyses, opinion and reactions that have told us
all about the Finance Minister’s proposals for the coming
fiscal.
But beneath the hype, the budget for 2005-06 etched in
a structural change that went largely, and sadly,
unreported.
For the first time, as many as 18 Union Ministries were
asked to do a gender disaggregated analysis so that they are
able to provide a reliable and studied indicator of how their
programmes impact gender. Described as welcome by some, and a
hasty patchwork by others, the fact remains that it marked the
arrival of ’gender budgeting‘ in India.
Says Ms.Veena Nayyar, President , ‘Women’s Political
Watch’: “A huge change has happened. It is a structural change
that tells us that gender budgeting has come to stay in
India.”
Ms.Nayyar was among the key speakers at a symposium
organised in the last week of March by POPULATION FIRST in
association with the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
<http://www.unifem.org.in/>, which works
on gender issues. HDFC Bank was the corporate sponsor for the
event.
Among the speakers at the symposium was the noted
marketing consultant Ms.Kamini Banga. Often, Ms.Banga pointed
out, women had yielded all space on budget and related matters
to men, and this made it that much more difficult for women to
understand the budget, let alone analyse it from a gender
perspective. The fact that all development investments have
different impacts on men and women demands that we take up
advocacy on gender budgeting more seriously.
What precisely is gender
budgeting?
The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and
Accountancy [CIPFA], UK’s leading professional accountancy
body and the only one, which specialises in the public
services, gives a rather lucid explanation: “Gender Budget
Initiatives or Gender Responsive Budgets are tools and
processes designed to facilitate a gender analysis in the
formation of government budgets and the allocation of
resources. Gender budgets are not separate budgets for women
or for men. They are attempts to break down or disaggregate
the government’s mainstream budget according to its impact on
women and men.”
A
typical budget is often viewed as a gender neutral exercise,
under which allocations and their impacts are seen and studied
by plan, sector, area, growth potential and other non gender
perspectives. However, this ignores the fact that the impact
varies by gender, and the varying impacts can be found even in
sectors where gender might ordinarily be thought not to play
any role at all.
Explains Dr.Nirmala Banerjee of Schetana, Kolkata, one
of the speakers at the symposium and an authority on gender
budgets: “They say you cannot have women friendly roads. But
ask the women and they will tell you that they want less and
less of highways and more and more of roads to schools and
health centres.” It is a mismatch that only a gender audit of
the budget can correct. [See Box: Excerpts from the document
“Gender Budget Initiative” by Dr.Nirmala Banerjee, as
published by the Department of Women and Child Development,
Government of India.]
As CIPFA of UK explains: “The way in which national
budgets are usually formulated ignores the different socially
determined roles, responsibilities and capabilities of men and
women. Budgets formed from a gender-neutral perspective ignore
the different impacts on men and women because their roles,
responsibilities and capacities in any society are never the
same.”
Gender budgets thus become “an important tool for
analysing the gap between expressed commitments by government
and the decision making process involved in how governments
raise and spend money.”
The symposium on the subject was held in Mumbai less
than a month after the Union budget proposals were presented
to Parliament, and it sought to highlight what the media often
ignored in budget reporting.
As Ms.Nayyar said: “Why is it that this aspect [gender
budgeting] has not been discussed by any channel or the print
media? Is the budget only about corporates to comment
on?”
The Finance Minister, himself, acknowledged in his
budget speech that his step for gender budgeting was only a
beginning: “Last July, I promised to consider gender
budgeting. Honorable Members will be happy to note that I have
included in the Budget documents, a separate statement
highlighting the gender sensitivities of the budgetary
allocations under 10 demands for grants. The total amount in
Budget Estimates 2005-06, according to the statement, is Rs.
14,379 crore. Although this is another first in budget-making
in India, it is only a beginning and, in course of time, all
departments will be required to present gender budgets as well
as make benefit-incidence analyses.”
But not everyone is enthused by the pace of change seen
at the central level.
In a critique presented at the March symposium,
Ms.Aruna Kanchi and Ms.Divya Pandey of the Research Centre for
Women’s Studies at the SNDT Women’s University noted: “We are
disappointed by the final product. First, it appears to be a
hastily put together piece of work, a last minute addition to
the main budget… many sectors/departments of importance to
women or where women have a substantial presence such as
public health, agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry
find no place in this gender budgeting exercise.”
Yet, Ms.Nayyar points out that the Union Budget was a
step forward. “Until now, women were ghettoised in the
department of women and child development. But the finance
minister has brought gender audit in as many as 18 mainstream
ministries.”
This change has its own dynamic and momentum, and leads
to a structural change in thinking so that the nation, the
debate and the budget moves on from what is gender budgeting,
to how to do it, to doing it better and on a larger
scale.
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