The Hindu Business Line : Gender budget

AN innovation introduced by the Finance Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, in the budget last year — and continued this year — has received only cursory attention without exciting much interest. For the first time in this country, he has brought in the near-revolutionary concept of gender budgeting. But it is doubtful whether even officialdom, leave alone the lay public, has cottoned on to the precise connotation or implications of this newly embedded criterion.

A comprehensive overview of the genesis, objectives, merits and experience of other countries which have adopted it is available in an article "Integrating Gender into Government Budgets: A New Perspective" by Profs. Marilyn Marks Rubin and John R. Bartle published in the May-June 2005 issue of Public Administration Review. It confirms the fact of there being virtually no reference to this novel principle in the literature relating to public finance or the charter of demands of feminists (or femocrats, as they are now known).

This is really strange because at least 62 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East, Americas and the Pacific, including such forerunners as Australia, South Africa, Philippines, the UK and Canada, (but not yet the US!), have adopted this methodology and have some worthwhile approaches to offer. Essentially, the purpose of gender budgeting is to achieve gender equality and gender equity in the allocations and targets envisaged in the budget, by eliminating the scope for any bias or undue weightage working against the interests of women. It is meant to guarantee, with the help of suitable guidelines and formats for data collection and analysis, accrual of optimum benefits to women from provisions pertaining to the various components of the budget such as the imposition of taxes and duties, user charges and fees, incidence of expenditure and impact of specific programmes and schemes.

While certain areas of the budget such as maternity and child welfare are amenable to gender computation, most other areas may not lend themselves to desegregation based on their gender impact.

In this light, the statement on outlays and outcomes to be placed before Parliament may well turn out to be the first concrete case study of the manner of implementation of the concept in India.

B. S. Raghavan

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