The Union budget for 2024-25 has been widely reported to advance the cause of gender-responsive budgeting with the highest financial allocation of Rs 3.2 lakh crore as part of the gender budget statement. This is about 6.8% of the total expenditure budget and around 1% of GDP.
However, the question that arises is whether an increase in allocations for spending on women can truly qualify a budget as ‘gender-responsive’. This needs to be looked at considering two factors.
First, whether there has been a real increase in the allocations for women or whether the increased allocations being reported are a result of an accounting exercise, as has been contested by others.
Second and more importantly, in our opinion, does this gender budget address the foundational objectives of a truly gender-responsive budget?
To address this latter concern, let us revisit what is meant by gender-responsive budgets. According to UN Women, “gender-responsive budgets require a whole government approach, robust institutional frameworks, political will, laws in place to support equal distribution of resources, reliable data to fully understand the diverse needs of people, engagement with the private sector and civil society and monitoring and evaluation systems to inform future budget adjustments.”
The gender budget handbook published by the Ministry of Women and Child Development also identifies gender budgeting as a tool for gender mainstreaming. The guidelines suggest that the gender budget is an entry point to applying a gender lens to the entire policy process of the government.
Using these definitions, we examine, by using illustrations from the recently presented budget, whether it really represents a ‘gender-responsive budget’. These illustrations have been chosen based on the priorities listed by the finance minister in her budget speech.
The finance minister identified increasing agricultural productivity as one of the nine priority areas of the budget. The government also identifies women and farmers as two key focus groups for the budget. However, when we apply the gender lens, we find that adequate measures have not been taken to ensure equitable policies and allocations for improving productivity in the agricultural sector.
Oxfam International estimates that about 70% of all agricultural activities in India are executed by women cultivators and agricultural labourers. However, women are hardly recognised as farmers since the identification of a person as a farmer is linked to ownership of land and in India. Only 13.9% of total landowners are women as per the agricultural census, as cited here.
Recognising women as farmers is an essential step towards ensuring access to credit, technology and productive resources such as water and fertilisers. Research shows that the inadequate use of productive resources such as land, water, credit, technology and training has resulted in about an 11% of productivity loss in women-led farms as compared to those led by their male counterparts in India, and improving women farmers’ access to such resources is critical in bridging this productivity gap.
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International studies also suggest similar results.
Hence, a gender-responsive budget in such a context would have taken initiatives towards the recognition of women as farmers and enabling their access to resources. However, no such initiatives or schemes are announced. Neither is any allocation made towards the empowerment of women farmers.
On the other hand, the budget speech indicates that the major focus in the agricultural sector is on technology-led productivity increases through high-yielding and climate-resilient seed varieties.
Women are less likely to be able to make the best use of this initiative due to their lack of access to credit and productive resources as mentioned earlier. Hence, the budget fails to be gender-responsive in its truest sense considering the need of women farmers.
Similarly, employment and skilling are other identified priority areas in the budget with multiple new programmes announced. The budget announced programmes aiming at the skilling of the workforce, improving access to educational loans, providing assistance to new entrants to the labour force and incentivising employers for hiring.
It is worth noticing that most of these measures are supply-side measures. The efficacy of adopting only supply-side measures in improving the employment scenario can be questioned. However, even within the supply-side measures, efforts such as the collection and analysis of gender-segregated data and adopting corrective measures to ensure that women benefit equally from these initiatives is missing.
In the budget speech, the finance minister also announced measures for increasing women’s labour force participation, such as women-specific skilling programmes, the building of creches and working women’s hostels, and the promotion of self-employment through self-help groups (SHGs).
The government’s commitment to building more creches and hostels is clearly a step in the right direction. It alleviates the care work responsibilities of women, one of the core reasons for their inability to join the labour force.
On the other hand, the efficacy of initiatives such as women-specific skilling programmes and the promotion of self-employment through SHGs without any measures to address structural barriers is questionable.
Women-specific skilling programmes have been one of the measures adopted for increasing female labour force participation for about a decade since the inception of the Skill India programme. A 2019 National Sample Survey Office survey shows that about 46.9% of women who received formal vocational training were unable to enter the labour force, whereas only 12% of males failed to do so.
There is also evidence showing that micro, small and medium enterprises as well as large companies showed reluctance to employ women due to security risks and mobility restrictions for women even after their being formally skilled.
Similarly, for the promotion of self-employment for women through SHGs, there is enough literature to suggest that the micro-credit provided through SHGs often goes towards consumption rather than enterprise promotion.
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There are also concerns that micro-credits have increased the debt burden for rural women. The reasons for this can be various, including a lack of any measures towards facilitating forward and backward linkages, access to markets, etc.
Both measures, while aiming to facilitate women’s participation in the labour force, do not address the structural issues involved and hence, their efficacy can be questioned.
Moreover, the government has also failed to address the issue that women are more likely to have underpaid and exploitative jobs. A classic case for the same is the delegation of women professionals such as ASHA and anganwadi workers as volunteer workers, thus resulting in their being massively underpaid and being refused the social security measures available for other government professionals.
On the other hand, programmes such as MGNREGA and urban employment guarantee schemes are proven to have contributed significantly to increasing female labour force participation, increasing demand in the economy and in turn boosting the demand for employees, and bridging the gender pay gap.
However, these see a net zero increase in investment or no investment at all in the recently announced budget.
The objective of gender budgeting is to apply a gender lens throughout the policy process of the government. Revenue generation measures including tax regimes are an integral component of budgets. Therefore, it is critical that we scrutinise the tax-related measures announced in the budget from a gender lens as well.
For example, one of the most talked about components of the budget has been the changes to the tax regime through increasing standard deductions, which provides some relief to salaried employees. However, what will be the gendered benefit incidence of this initiative? Only 15% of tax filers were women as per a report released by the State Bank of India in 2024. Thus, men are more likely to benefit from this measure than women.
Policy measures that focus on increasing the participation of women in the formal workforce as well as those that aim to bring down the gender wage gap and eventually bring more women under the tax-paying bracket will improve the benefit incidence of such measures.
However, as discussed in the previous paragraphs, there are multiple concerns associated with the policy measures announced with the aim of improving female workforce participation.
While at first glance it appears that there is an increase in allocations as part of the gender budget statement as well as in the announcement of policy measures aimed at improving ‘women-led development,’ the analysis of the annual budget statement of 2024-25 from a gender lens shows that the government has a long way to go to truly understand women as contributors to the development of the country and not merely as beneficiaries of development initiatives.
Abida U.C. is research assistant and Archana Purohit senior research adviser at the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies.
