Government of Maharashtra has adopted gender budgeting from the year ________.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (b) 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.  (d) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2022 Q25 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q25 — Economy PYQ with Answer