What is meant by Gender Budget ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), 'Independent provisions for women in the general budget'. Gender budgeting is not a budget of its own; it is a way of reading and constructing the ordinary budget so that the provisions made for women within it can be identified, measured and held to account. The reasoning behind it is that a budget which looks neutral on its face need not be neutral in its effects: an allocation for hostels, transport, sanitation, skills training or health reaches men and women in different proportions depending on how it is designed, and unless someone asks the question the difference is never seen. Gender budgeting asks it systematically. In India this takes the form of a dedicated Gender Budget Statement presented with the Union Budget documents since 2005-06, in which ministries report their allocations under two heads: a first part covering schemes in which the entire provision is meant for women and girls, and a second part covering schemes in which women are intended to receive a substantial share of a wider allocation. Nothing in this arrangement removes money from the general budget into a separate one. The provisions sit inside the ordinary demands for grants of the ordinary ministries, and the statement is a lens laid over them, which is exactly what option (4) describes with the words 'independent provisions … in the general budget'. The institutional machinery follows the same logic: the Ministry of Women and Child Development acts as the nodal ministry, and gender budgeting cells within the various ministries and departments are meant to review schemes at the design stage rather than merely to count spending afterwards. This is why gender budgeting is described as an instrument of gender mainstreaming — it works by changing how the whole budget is made, not by carving a corner out of it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Nothing in the practice of gender budgeting produces a separate budget for men, and the option is wrong in both of its elements at once — in supposing that a separate budget is created and in identifying men as the group whose provisions are being tracked. Gender budgeting arose because the outlays of a general budget were reaching women less well than they reached men, so the exercise is directed at making the provisions for women visible and adequate. The option is in the set to complete a symmetrical pattern of four choices — separate budget for men, separate budget for women, provisions for men, provisions for women — which is a common way of constructing an option set for a definition question, and which means that a candidate has to get both variables right rather than one.  (b) This is the trap the question is built around, and it is chosen by candidates who have the right subject and the wrong mechanism. Gender budgeting does not mean that the government prepares a second budget document exclusively for women, with its own revenue and its own expenditure. The allocations concerned remain inside the ordinary budgets of the ordinary ministries, and what is prepared separately is a statement that identifies and totals them, so that the provision made for women can be seen and questioned. The distinction matters in practice as well as in definition: because gender budgeting works within the general budget, it can reach into every ministry's spending, whereas a separate women's budget would confine attention to whatever had been carved out and would leave the far larger remainder unexamined.  (c) This option gets the mechanism right and the beneficiary wrong, which makes it the mirror image of the previous one. It correctly describes gender budgeting as the identification of independent provisions inside the general budget rather than as the creation of a separate document, and a candidate who reaches it has understood the harder half of the definition. What remains is to notice which group the exercise concerns. Gender budgeting in India, and in the international practice from which it derives, is directed at the position of women and girls, because it was the invisibility of their share in public spending that the technique was devised to correct. A careful reader will also see that this option and option (4) differ in a single word, which is a signal that the difference between them is the whole point of the question.

Concept: Gender budgeting belongs to a family of techniques that examine a budget by whom it reaches rather than by what it buys, and it rests on the distinction between a budget that is gender-neutral in form and one that is gender-neutral in effect. The exercise typically runs in several stages: an analysis of the situation of women and men in a sector, an assessment of whether existing policies address the gaps found, an examination of whether the money allocated matches those policies, a check on whether the money was actually spent as intended, and finally a review of whether outcomes for women improved. India's practice has developed the first three stages most fully through the Gender Budget Statement, which classifies reported allocations into those meant wholly for women and girls and those in which women are expected to receive a substantial share of a broader programme. The Ministry of Women and Child Development is the nodal ministry, and gender budgeting cells were established in ministries and departments to carry the analysis into scheme design. Several state governments have adopted the same instrument for their own budgets. The essential point to hold is that the technique is diagnostic and procedural: it changes how a budget is examined and framed, and it does not create a parallel budget or a separate pool of money.

State PCS 2023 Q60 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q60 — Economy PYQ with Answer