How We Know the Government Isn’t Spending on Women’s Safety Programs
Until last year’s budget, the Union government touted 'Nari Shakti' (women’s power) as central to its development agenda. It appears that they have now forsaken this goal – and perhaps for good reason – as the government has been unable to justify how it allocates and spends on critical welfare programs for women and girls. This is especially concerning for measures that promote their safety, well-being, and right to access justice.
Crimes against women have increased at an average rate of 4% between 2019 and 2023, as per the National Crime Records Bureau’s Crime in India reports. Further, one in three women in India face domestic violence, but less than 10% of these women are seeking help from formal authorities like police, courts and hospitals.
Current budgetary trends for key women’s safety programs misrepresent the need to address this urgent public health and human rights issue. We must, therefore, seek state accountability for how its programs prevent and respond to violence against women/girls and other forms of discrimination.
Trends in spending after safety programs were merged in 2021-22
In 2021-22, the nodal ministry merged several of its programs on women’s “safety, security and empowerment” under the umbrella scheme of Mission Shakti with two sub-schemes: Sambal for safety and security, and Samarthya for empowerment. The direct consequence of this merging exercise is that the ministry’s expenditure budget does not provide disaggregated allocations and expenditures for programs under these merged sub-schemes, making it difficult to measure progress and prioritisation for program-specific goals.
For instance, programs such as Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, One Stop Centre, Nari Adalat, and Women Helpline (181) were merged under Sambal. The Union government’s budget only reports allocations for the sub-schemes – Sambal and Samarthya, without sharing detailed descriptions and allocations for the programs under it.
The ministry’s budget expenditures (or allocations) for Sambal reveal a grim picture of its utilisation rates (the proportion of budgeted expenditure spent) since the merging exercise in 2021-22 (Figure 1). Despite low allocations for Sambal programs to begin with – constituting only 2.2% of the nodal Ministry’s budgeted expenditure for 2026-27 – it has spent only about a third of the allocated funds in most years.
Figure 1: For most years, only about a third of allocations were spent on the Sambal sub-scheme
Source: Expenditure budget documents of the Ministry of Women and Child Development, 2021-22 to 2026-27, https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/
This picture resonates with the utilisation trends across Sambal programs (Figure 2), as per a Lok Sabha Question reply on Schemes for Safety of Women dated December 5, 2025. The proportion of budgeted expenditure spent peaked in 2023-24, but fell again in 2024-25 and 2025-26. No Sambal program has ever spent its full allocations.
Figure 2: Spending is declining for all Sambal programs since 2023-24
Source: Lok Sabha Question reply on Schemes for Safety of Women dated 05 December 2025. https://sansad.in. Note: The utilisation figures for 2025-26 are till November 30, 2025.
It is also worth noting that the allocations for the One Stop Centre and the Women Helpline programs comprise more than 60% of Sambal’s share, followed by Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (~35-40% across years) and Nari Adalat (<1% across years). Waning utilisation trends have serious implications for the state’s ability to respond to violence against women/girls. Even if women make it to the crisis centres, inadequate budgets to run them may be limiting women’s ability to access and secure justice through these centres. This adds to the already low reporting or disclosure rates of domestic violence with formal services, while also compromising the one-stop promise of response through these centres.
At the same time, the stagnant – and (marginally) increasing – allocations for the Sambal sub-scheme are rather arbitrary as they do not justify the decreasing utilisation trends over the years. This is because of a simple reason that, in a resource-constrained context with competing demands and priorities, money should be allocated based on spending capacity. Spending signals need or demand, justifying future allocations.
But for women’s safety programs, the issue is not of low need, as the high rate of violence against women and low formal help-seeking rates already suggest. Evidence also shows that existing domestic violence response services are not enough for most women who may need support. So where does the problem lie?
Along with the merging exercise, the Union government also changed the fund flow system in 2021-22, which is the most instructive reason for the low utilisation trends for its safety programs.
Centralised fund flow impacts the functioning of safety programs
The Union government provides 100% financial assistance to programs under Sambal. In 2021-22, the new fund flow administration led to funds being routed through states and union territories, instead of directly into the district administration’s coffers, which oversees the everyday implementation of Sambal programs.
For the One Stop Centre program, this has also resulted in a system where some state governments, like Delhi’s, do not release money to a centre unless all centres in its jurisdiction have met the spending criteria. This means that funding is not dependent on need (some centres assist more women and, hence, need more contingency funds), but on a centralised whim.
This bureaucratic rigmarole has contributed to poor reporting, including delays, of money spent by state governments for the One Stop Centre program. See, for instance, the Union funds allocated or released to state governments for their (un)reported utilisations between 2019-20 and 2023-24 in the Lok Sabha question reply on One Stop Centre dated 04 April 2025. Twelve out of 36 states and UTs did not share their utilisation certificates in 2023-24. Consequently, over the years, the Union government has stopped releasing grants or is lowering its annual releases for some of these state governments.
The change in fund flow, in turn, impacts the functioning of these programs. In its recent report for the Ministry of Women and Child Development, the Rajya Sabha department-related standing committee for education, women, children, youth and sports raised several issues in the functioning of One Stop Centres. Issues of low staff salaries, poor training, and an inadequate number of crisis centres in the country suggest that most women and girls who need immediate support to lead violence-free lives are not receiving it.
Similarly, for Nari Adalats, the committee recommended that the ministry fast-track its implementation across the country’s districts and also increase the program’s ambit by involving counsellors and psychiatrists to provide comprehensive support to women.
The consequence of this centralised fiscal administration is a vicious cycle of low demand, spending and allocations for safety programs. Women will not trust state-run crisis centres for accessing justice and reporting violence (low demand), building on existing low spending and further justifying lower allocations for these programs. In the long term, the state could conveniently evade its responsibility for reducing violence against women/girls and barriers to their comprehensive socio-economic and political participation in the country’s development.
One thing is certain: centralisation seldom works in sensitive and unpredictable crisis settings like One Stop Centres, as women and girls facing abuse or violence may have different needs. With funds tied to the idiosyncrasies of higher-level authorities, the last-mile actors may struggle to provide support during contingencies and emergencies.
Fixing this fiscal system is an important step for achieving the objectives the Union government had set out for these programs. Only then would it inch closer towards ensuring that women and girls can access nuanced support and timely justice through the safety programs.
Endnotes
- Beti Bachao Beti Padhao aims to reduce female foeticide and infanticide, and improve girls' education outcomes through behavioural and social change communication. One Stop Centre is a crisis response service, providing psycho-social counselling and coordinating with police, hospital, and courts, for victim-survivors of gender-based violence. Nari Adalat are alternate sites for grievance redressal for women at the Gram Panchayat level. Women Helpline (181) are emergency helpline for women seeking any kind of emergency support. They were recently merged with the One Stop Centre program. See all programs here.
- The explanatory notes section of the Ministry's expenditure budget in 2026-27 shares the earmarked allocation for the One Stop Centre program, financed through the Nirbhaya Fund, for the first time since merging exercise in 2021-22.
Tanya Rana is an independent researcher studying how the welfare system reaches women in India.
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