The Economic Survey 2023-24, released a day before the Budget, states, “India is transitioning from women’s development to women-led development with the vision of a new India where women are equal partners in the story of growth and national progress.”
Considering that India usually ranks quite poorly in all gender-related indices, this is a very welcome statement.
The Union finance minister also made a reference to this in her budget speech, “For promoting women-led development, the budget carries an allocation of more than Rs 3 lakh crore for schemes benefitting women and girls. This signals our government’s commitment for enhancing women’s role in economic development.”
Even before getting into the details of the various initiatives for women-led development and how adequate and appropriate they are, just a cursory look at the budget documents shows that this is probably just another jumla.
The budget documents include a gender budget statement (GBS) which puts together the budget provisions under different schemes across ministries and departments that benefit women and girls.
The GBS is divided into three parts, Part A includes schemes with 100% provision for women, Part B has schemes with 30-99% allocations for women, and Part C those with allocations for women up to 30%.
The total of these three parts is the gender budget and this as mentioned by the finance minister is over Rs 3 lakh crore this year. The moot question is whether this shift in focus to women-led development, is the gender budget very different from previous years?
In first glance, it does seem like there is a substantial increase in the budgetary allocations for women and girls with the total gender budget for 2024-25 (BE) being Rs 327158.44 crore compared to Rs 238219.75 for 2023-24 (BE).
This reflects an increase from 5.3% of total expenditure (TE) and 0.8% of GDP in 2023-24 to 6.9% of TE and 1% of GDP in 2024-25. What is puzzling however is that this impressive increase is not mirrored in either some major new initiative for women or in an increase in existing budgets for schemes targeting women. In fact, the entire budget for the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD) has increased by about Rs 600 crores (a 2.5% rise over last year).
Digging deeper into the GBS, one finds that what has basically been done is a change in what gets reported in this statement and how. While some of these changes actually reflect an improvement in what gets included in the GBS, the total gender budget is not comparable with previous years because of these methodological differences. So just looking at the totals conveys a message of a huge increase which in reality is only a difference in the accounting standards used.
One of the ways in which this has been done is to include schemes in the gender budget which were not earlier considered. For example, Part-B shows an allocation of Rs 3975 crore under the Reform Linked Distribution Scheme of the Ministry of Power in 2024-25, but this scheme does not appear in the earlier years. The budget of the Ministry of Power shows that this scheme had an allocation of about Rs 12,000 crores this year as well as last year!
For some reason, it was only now decided that over 30% of this budget can be considered an allocation for women.
A second change is related to what proportion of the budget of a scheme gets reported as gender budget. For instance, while the National Rural Livelihood Mission-Aajeevika of the Ministry of Rural Development was under the Part-B of the gender budget in previous years (with about 50% of total allocation for the scheme), this year it has been shifted to Part-A where 100% of the scheme allocation is included. This shift alone increases the gender budget by over Rs 7,000 crores whereas the total allocation for Aajeevika is less than Rs 1000 higher in BE 2024-25 (Rs 15047.00) compared to BE 2023-24 (Rs 14129.17 crore).
Then there are some schemes such as the pensions for aged, disabled and single women under the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) which for some reason show no allocations in the BE for 2023-24 but suddenly appear in the RE. These schemes have seen absolutely no increase in overall budgetary allocations over the last many years. A major scheme in this category is the Jal Jeevan Mission which alone accounts for over Rs 34,000 crore increase compared to BE 2023-24 (it is nil in BE for 2023-24 and only included in RE). LPG connection to poor households, KUSUM, PM Vishwakarma are other such schemes which show no allocation in BE 2023-24 but are included in RE 2023-24 and BE 2024-25.
There are also many other new entries in the GBS such as a proportion of the budgets for Sangeet Natak Akademi, National School of Drama of the Ministry of Culture, NHRC and Census Survey and Statistics of the Ministry of Home Affairs and so on. One of the only genuinely ‘new’ schemes for women seems to be the Namo Drone Didi scheme which has an allocation of Rs 500 crore.
The point of these examples is basically to show that there is in fact no increase in the budget for women this year, rather some accounting trickery which shows a substantial rise. While improving reporting in the GBS is definitely required, this needs to be done in a more transparent manner. Further, the GBS should be a part of Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) which is an entire process towards ensuring a fairer distribution of resources.
The UN Women says that, “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.”
What we have in place instead is an opaque system that conducts gender budgeting as merely an accounting exercise making arbitrary methodological changes.
Dipa Sinha is a development economist.
