Gender responsive budgeting in India: Trends and Analysis

Gender based violence is quite common in almost all the developing countries. Religion, customs, age-old prejudices, etc. have put Indian women in a subservient and exploitable position in many domains of life. Low rates of participation in education, lack of economic independence, value biases operating against them, etc., have resulted in the women being dependent on men folk and other institutions of authority like the family, neighbourhood and the society.

The Budget is an important tool in the hands of state for affirmative action for improvement of gender relations through reduction of gender gap in the development process. It can help to reduce economic inequalities, between men and women as well as between the rich and the poor. Budget impacts women's lives in several ways. It directly promotes women's development through allocation of budgetary funds for women's programmes and reduces opportunities for empowerment of women through budgetary cuts. Gender budget doesn't mean a separate budget for women rather gender budget is an attempt to assess government priorities as they are reflected through the budget and examine how they impact women and men and within that, certain groups of women and men. Gender Budget doesn't look at whether or not the same is spent on men and women but rather at what the impact of the spending is on men and women and whether or not budgets respond to the needs of both women and men adequately. Thus, Government of India has undertaken Gender budgeting initiatives contribute to ‘gender mainstreaming’ by focusing on the gender dimensions of government budgets.

Through Preliminary survey of studies it has been found that there is enough scope and opportunity to present a critical analysis of the trends and characteristics of gender budgeting by Government of India with some empirical evidences. Hence the papers further aims to evaluate the composition of the total outlay for women in the State Budget in terms of the priorities across different sectors relating to different needs of women; and to suggest recommendations for budgetary policies that can be adopted by the State for addressing the different needs of women. For the purpose of the study at hand the researcher has relied on secondary data sources with this background; the paper also underlines the implications for future research and practice.