Context: Despite the annual promise to improve women’s welfare, India’s gender budget remains skewed and ineffective.

Current scenario

• According to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimate for 2016, at least 80 countries practised gender budgeting. This list includes India, where gender budgets were launched in FY06 with the hope of tackling stark gender inequality.
• In India, Budgetary allocations for “100% women-specific programmes” in 2018-19, as listed in Part A of the Gender Budget Statement (GBS), declined.
• The government estimates these figures by adding all the spending on women-related schemes. This comprises spending on schemes that only target women (Part A), such as Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao, and Part B schemes, which partially target women (where at least 30% of the scheme’s benefits go to women).
• Between the two, Part B schemes, such as the Mid-Day Meal programme, dominates (around 80% of the gender budget in FY20).
• Despite some sops to women: a cut in provident fund contribution, and 80 million free gas connections for poor women, a closer examination of allocation of funds reveals that the budget had very little for women in it.

About Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana -Gramin (PMAY-G)

• The gender budget is organized in two parts, A and B.The biggest component of GBS (Part A) in recent years has been the subsidized rural housing programme: the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana -Gramin (PMAY-G), formerly called the Indira Awaas Yojana.However, the PMAY-G is not targeted specifically towards women.
• The scheme guidelines do not specify any fixed amount of money or share of houses to be granted to women, though female-headed households without a male member, or households having a single girl child, are given preference as beneficiaries.
• Though budgetary allotment for this scheme has shot up in recent years, houses built for women have fallen, both in absolute numbers and as a share of total houses built.
• Lack of demand is most probably not a reason for the fall in houses built for women. Census 2011 puts the total number of female-headed households in rural India at about 17.5 million. Out of them, 62%, or about 10 million households, live in kutcha (temporary) houses.
• Despite this apparent need for pucca houses, only about 5 million houses for women have been built under PMAY-G since 2010-11.
• It’s thus misleading to include entire allocation for PMAY-G in gender budget especially when the number of houses built for women have been falling.
• Both centre and states need to take accountability for the slow completion rate of houses and disbursal of funds.

About Gender inequality issues in India

• One reason for the lack of concerted action on gender spending could be political will. India’s decision-makers—both members of Parliament and ministers—are overwhelmingly male, even after improvements in recent years. Currently, only 10% of all ministers are women. Only 14% of current Lok Sabha members are women.
• Gender inequality remains rife in other aspects of Indian life. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020, gender equality in India is among the worst in the world. Across measures of women’s economic participation, education, health and political empowerment, it ranked 112th out of 153 nations.
• “Gender budgeting in India is often done as an accounting exercise, post-facto, rather than actually thinking through and designing women-centric schemes and tracking their outcomes.