MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 25 of 100

Correct — option (3), 2013. The Government of Maharashtra adopted gender budgeting from that year, following the extension of a practice that the Union government had begun some years earlier and then pressed the states to take up. Before anything else, notice how this question is printed, because the layout is the trap. The four years are set out as 2011, 2015, 2013 and 2019, which is not ascending order, and the year that is keyed sits at the third position rather than at the second where a candidate scanning for chronological order would expect to find it. Several questions in this paper print their options out of the order a reader assumes, and a candidate who half-remembers the answer as an early year and reaches for whichever option looks early will take 2011 by reflex. Read the four values before choosing between them. On the substance, gender budgeting is not a separate budget for women and does not mean setting aside a pot of money labelled for them. It is a method of examining an ordinary budget through a gender lens at every stage — when priorities are set, when money is allocated, when it is spent and when the results are audited — in order to ask whether public expenditure that appears neutral in fact reaches women and men differently. The Union government institutionalised the idea by introducing a Gender Budget Statement in the Union Budget for 2005 to 2006, in which departmental allocations are reported in two parts: Part A carries schemes in which the whole provision is meant for women, and Part B carries schemes in which at least thirty per cent of the provision is expected to reach them. The Ministry of Women and Child Development is the nodal ministry for the exercise, and departments were required to set up Gender Budgeting Cells to prepare their returns. Because a state government spends the larger share of the money that touches health, education, water, nutrition and local development, the exercise is of limited use if it stops at the Centre, and the extension of gender budgeting to the states was the natural next step; Maharashtra's adoption from 2013 belongs to that phase. The state has since carried the practice further, and its Finance Department has published gender budget statements — alongside a child budget statement in the more recent budgets — together with a roadmap for gender and child budgeting. Option (3) is therefore the answer.

• (1)2011 — 2011 is the year most likely to be chosen in error, and the reason is positional rather than factual: it is printed first, and a candidate who recalls only that Maharashtra adopted gender budgeting fairly early will take the earliest-looking option on the page without reading the other three. The habit is worth breaking, because this paper repeatedly prints numerical options out of their natural order and a reflex answer will be wrong whenever it does. There is also a substantive confusion available here. Gender budgeting at the Union level dates from the Budget for 2005 to 2006, when the Gender Budget Statement was first presented, and a candidate who has that date in mind may reason that the states followed within a few years and pick an early option to match. The Union date and the Maharashtra date are different facts about different governments, and the question asks only about the second.
• (2)2015 — 2015 is wrong, and it is the option that a candidate arrives at by approximate reasoning rather than by recall — the sense that the practice spread to the states somewhere in the middle of the last decade. Approximation cannot distinguish 2013 from 2015, which is exactly why an examiner places the two within a couple of years of each other, and it is a reminder that year questions have to be prepared as facts and not as impressions. Note also the printing: 2015 sits at the second position and 2013 at the third, so a candidate who has correctly recalled the answer as 2013 but is scanning the row in the expectation of ascending order can still mark the wrong box. Where a question offers four bare years, the safest procedure is to read all four aloud in the mind before deciding, since the eye is a poor judge of an unsorted list.
• (4)2019 — 2019 is wrong as the year of adoption, though it is the most interesting of the three errors because it is close to a different and real development. Adopting gender budgeting as a method of analysis and publishing a formal gender budget statement as part of the state's budget documents are two separate steps, and the second came considerably later in Maharashtra than the first; the state's Finance Department has published gender budget statements in recent years, latterly alongside a child budget statement, and has issued a roadmap for gender and child budgeting. A candidate who has read about those documents may date the state's gender budgeting from them. The stem asks when the government adopted gender budgeting, which is the earlier step, and the key records that as 2013.

Gender budgeting begins from an observation about public expenditure that is easy to state and hard to act on: a budget that mentions no gender at all can still affect women and men very differently, because they use public services differently, bear different unpaid burdens at home, and start from different positions in the labour market and in landholding. A road, a water supply scheme, a hostel or an agricultural extension programme is not neutral in effect merely because it is neutral in wording. Gender budgeting is therefore a method rather than a fund. It runs through the whole budget cycle — priority setting, allocation, expenditure and audit — and asks at each stage who benefits, and it can lead either to redesigning an existing scheme or to creating a new one. In India the practice was institutionalised at the Union level with the introduction of a Gender Budget Statement in the Budget for 2005 to 2006. That statement reports departmental provisions in two parts: Part A lists schemes in which the entire allocation is intended for women, and Part B lists schemes in which at least thirty per cent of the allocation is expected to reach them. The Ministry of Women and Child Development is the nodal ministry, and departments and ministries were required to constitute Gender Budgeting Cells to prepare and defend their returns. The obvious limitation of the exercise at the Union level is the structure of Indian public finance: the states spend the larger share of the money that touches health, nutrition, school education, water and local development, so a gender analysis confined to the Union budget misses most of the expenditure that matters to women's lives. Extending the practice to the states was accordingly the necessary second phase, and it is that phase to which Maharashtra's adoption belongs. A further refinement visible in Maharashtra's recent budget documents is the pairing of a gender budget statement with a child budget statement, which applies the same logic to a second group whose interests an ordinary budget line does not name.

MPSC's paper carries a steady quota of Maharashtra-specific administrative and financial facts, and this question is a clean example: the concept is national but the fact asked for is the state's own. That is worth planning around, because a candidate preparing only from central-government material will meet several questions in every paper that no national textbook contains. The second lesson here is about the layout of options, and it applies well beyond this item. This paper prints numerical options out of their natural order more than once — a set of years running 2011, 2015, 2013, 2019 here, and a set of numbers running 337, 338, 336, 335 elsewhere — and the deliberate disordering exists to catch a candidate who is matching a remembered answer against the shape of the row instead of against its contents. Under examination pressure the eye takes a list of four short numbers as a single visual object and assumes it is sorted, which is precisely the assumption the printing punishes. The defence is mechanical and costs a second: read each option as a value, not as a position, before marking anything. It is also worth noticing that this stem is a fill-in-the-blank in the English column with the blank at the end of the sentence, while the Marathi column places the blank in the middle; several questions in this paper differ in that way between the two blocks, and a bilingual candidate who checks the other column should not be unsettled by it.

• The Government of Maharashtra adopted gender budgeting from 2013, a state-level adoption of a practice the Union government had institutionalised some years earlier.
• Gender budgeting is not a separate budget for women; it is a method of examining an ordinary budget at every stage of the cycle — priority setting, allocation, expenditure and audit — to establish whether apparently neutral spending reaches women and men differently.
• At the Union level, a Gender Budget Statement was introduced in the Budget for 2005 to 2006, reporting departmental provisions in two parts: Part A for schemes whose entire allocation is meant for women and Part B for schemes where at least thirty per cent is expected to reach them.
• The Ministry of Women and Child Development is the nodal ministry for gender budgeting in India, and ministries and departments were required to set up Gender Budgeting Cells to prepare their returns.
• Because states spend the larger share of expenditure on health, nutrition, school education, water and local development, extending gender budgeting from the Centre to the states was essential; Maharashtra's Finance Department has since published gender budget statements alongside a child budget statement and issued a roadmap for gender and child budgeting.

• Assuming that a row of four years is printed in ascending order and marking by position rather than by value, which this paper punishes deliberately more than once
• Confusing the Union government's adoption of gender budgeting, marked by the Gender Budget Statement of 2005 to 2006, with a state government's own adoption, which is a separate and later fact
• Treating gender budgeting as a separate pool of money reserved for women rather than as a method of analysing the whole budget
• Dating a state's adoption of gender budgeting from the year it first published a formal gender budget statement, when the adoption of the practice and the publication of the statement can be several years apart

Maharashtra-specific facts of this kind are a fixed part of the MPSC paper and they are set in a small number of predictable shapes: the year a state policy or practice was adopted, the department or authority responsible for it, the name of a state scheme, and the state's position on some national indicator. Year questions are the most common because they are unambiguous to mark, and they are also the ones a candidate is most likely to lose through approximate memory, since the distractors are always placed within a few years of the answer. The way to prepare is a dated list of state initiatives kept alongside the corresponding national ones, so that the pair — the Union's gender budget statement of 2005 to 2006 and Maharashtra's adoption in 2013 — is learnt together and neither can be mistaken for the other. Expect the Commission to print such options out of chronological order, and expect at least one question in each paper to depend on that alone.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the Union Gender Budget Statement, what is the distinction between the schemes reported in Part A and those reported in Part B ?

  • (a)Part A carries central sector schemes and Part B carries centrally sponsored schemes
  • (b)Part A carries schemes whose entire allocation is meant for women, and Part B carries schemes where at least thirty per cent of the allocation is expected to reach them
  • (c)Part A carries plan expenditure and Part B carries non-plan expenditure
  • (d)Part A carries schemes of the Ministry of Women and Child Development and Part B carries schemes of all other ministries

  Answer(b) Part A carries schemes whose entire allocation is meant for women, and Part B carries schemes where at least thirty per cent of the allocation is expected to reach them. The two-part structure is the operational heart of the statement, because it separates spending that is unambiguously for women from the much larger body of general spending in which a substantial share is claimed to benefit them. The thirty per cent threshold in Part B is a reporting rule and not a guarantee of delivery, which is why gender audit is treated as a distinct exercise.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following statements best describes what gender budgeting means as it is practised in India ?

  • (a)A separate annual budget prepared exclusively for women's welfare schemes
  • (b)A statutory requirement that thirty per cent of every state's budget be spent on women
  • (c)A method of analysing an ordinary budget at every stage of the cycle to establish how it affects women and men differently
  • (d)A reservation of posts for women in the finance departments of the Union and the states

  Answer(c) A method of analysing an ordinary budget at every stage of the cycle to establish how it affects women and men differently. Gender budgeting creates no separate budget and imposes no statutory spending share; it works by making an existing budget legible in gender terms, so that allocations which appear neutral can be examined for who actually benefits, and schemes can be redesigned where the answer is unsatisfactory. The Ministry of Women and Child Development is the nodal ministry and departments prepare their returns through Gender Budgeting Cells.