"Gender Budgeting" - Women's Day Special

While going through "The Economist" (Feb 25th- March 3rd) I read a wonderful article related to "Gender Budgeting". The article titled, "Making Women Count", tried to link the promises of governments in regards to commitment towards the gender issues with finance of the country for better results.

A lot of promises are made during the time of elections for ensuring gender equality but the results are ultimately slack and disappointing. Promises, good words and laws alone can not ensure gender equality and fair participation of  half of the population of a country, like India, in the economic activities and labor force. Therefore Gender budgeting has been suggested as a tool of realizing the promises.

Gender budgeting is nothing but separate financial allocations in the budget for ensuring that the benefits of the policies reach the women, for example, it can be a tool to fight against issue like lower literacy rate among women, domestic violence, gap in the salary of men and women, access to job market and other institutions. If unfixed, they affect the economy of a country adversely. However, when costs and benefits are involved in the promises and policies of a government then the results can be expected to be better than otherwise.

"The Economist" notes that GB is not a new concept and has been sought by the feminist economists since 1980s. In regards to India as well, the technique of gender budgeting is not new. It has been introduced during UPA I in the financial year 2005-2006 by issuing a "Gender Budget Statement" and approving it as a regular practice since then. It has been followed by the current BJP government as well in the 2015-16 budget wherein the government has issued a separate GBS under statement 20 of the expenditure statement.

However this budgeting has not been implemented by all the state governments of India. Many ministries are coming forward for implementation of this policy but still there is a long way to go.

Some of the examples of gender budgeting include lowering of income tax on second earners which encourage the participation of women in the labor force and ultimately boosts the revenue and consumption power of the country. Apart from that child care, sanitation facilities in schools, separate educational institutions for girls for encouraging more intake of girls, a common practice in India, are some examples counted under the technique of GB. Sweden has declared its government as a "Feminist Government". Other countries that follow the technique are Finland, Austria, Belgium, South Africa, South Korea (although the salary gap between men and women in 2015 was highest in South Korea among the OECD countries), Rwanda, Uganda etc. IMF and World bank have backed this technique and are encouraging more countries to follow it.

The demand of the day is that all the state governments in India and other ministries should formulate policies to implement this technique for gender justice, fairer and equal participation of women in labor force and day to day life.