Sreelatha Menon: Gender budgeting

EAR TO THE GROUND

More ministries may have been coming out with gender disaggregated data, but they are yet to become gender-sensitive

A woman any day is the mother of all finance ministers. She makes the Budget month after month, making the penny last till the end.

Just as all her other services come free, does she do gender budgeting? Definitely. It may not mean more money for her expenses. But it would mean money spent in a way that would leave her with more time to work more.

When Finance Minister P Chidambaram turns into a housewife for the country on Budget day and also resolves to do gender budgeting, it is a good sign. It is a promise of Budgets being gender sensitive.

But in the last three years, it has definitely not shown up in more allocations for women-specific schemes.

More ministries may have been coming out with gender disaggregated data, but they are yet to become gender-sensitive.

For instance, this year the home ministry in its gender budget has set aside Rs 10 lakh for hiring women as contract workers. Had it set aside a couple of lakhs for providing daycare centres, health kiosks and shelters-cum-toilets near the work sites, it would have been more gender-sensitive.

Again, the urban development ministry, which has the CPWD under it, has no word on the facilities for women construction workers it hires. It has mentioned an existing employment scheme for women and got away. The Budget just separates data on men and women without going an extra mile to see things from a woman's perspective.

The PDS ministry wants to set up grain banks at a cost of Rs 5 crore. Yet, it is better than some ministries like defence, which is spending Rs 98,000 crore but doesn't have a word on gender.

Gender experts make a distinction between what is a monetary economy and a care economy. Care economy, unlike the revenue and expenditure economy, takes into account the intangible revenue contributed by women through services at home and in communities. The returns are not visible. They merely provide the edifice on which the monetary economy is built.

A care economy would provide more daycare centres as it would mean more women at work. It would provide public transport services in rural areas and suburbs as it would mean more women having access to healthcare.

India, which ratified the UN convention on elimination of all forms of discrimination against women in 1981, is under pressure to prove commitments to gender equality under the Millennium Development goals, through gender-friendly Budgets. Cosmetic beginnings have been made.

Gender budgeting cells are being set up. NGOs and gender experts are working with femocrats (feminine bureaucrats) to fish out the elusive woman component in state budgets, and, if possible, to supplement it.

The activity is almost identical to what has been seen in the last two decades in countries like Australia, which pioneered it all, Tanzania,

Canada, France, Scotland and 40 others. In Madhya Pradesh, NGO Women's Power Connect along with UNIFEM worked with the government this year to feminise the budget in some ways. Activists point out funds set aside to support women using the domestic violence Act as an instance. Another achievement: four special economic zones for women. States like Kerala and Karnataka have stuck to a bottom-up approach, with gender budgeting being encouraged at the panchayat level.

Cynics ask, why gender budgeting? The isolation of gender in a budget helps departments from losing sight of it.

But money and schemes alone won't suffice. Vision has to follow. That is something finance ministers must learn from their mothers.