The Hindu Business Line : Gender-sensitive budgeting

The concept of “gender budgeting,” which the Kerala Government has just embraced, could well advance the cause of women’s rights and interests in the State.

K.G. Kumar

Last week the Kerala Government released its “Women’s Policy”, which banks on the concept of "gender budgeting" to ensure that some allotments from the State’s annual budget and fiscal resources are set apart for women-oriented schemes and programmes.

For a society that has long accorded a significant role for women, it is not surprising that Kerala ought to lead the rest of Indian States in furthering the rights and position of women. Many scholars have noted this remarkable characteristic of Kerala’s sociocultural make-up. For instance, as far back as 1991, in a response in The New York Review of Books, Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen pointed out the importance of Kerala’s public policy of promoting mass education in the past and that of pro-woman inheritance laws applying to a powerful section of the population.

female-male ratio

“Kerala has never had a female-male ratio below unity at any time in this century. The Communist party first came into office in Kerala in 1957. In the census preceding that (in 1951), Kerala’s female-male ratio was already as high as 1.028, and in the subsequent censuses we see some variations in that ratio – falling to 1.022 in 1961 and to 1.016 in 1971, before rising again to 1.032 in 1981 and to 1.040 in the 1991 census,” Dr Sen noted.

The explanation for this, he added, can be traced to the pre-independence history of the State, and the educational policies pursued in the “native kingdoms” of Travancore and Cochin (outside British India), which make up the bulk of today’s Kerala.

The causal chain of Kerala’s exceptional record goes back in history and includes, among other things, such steps as the public policy of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘diffusion of education,’ clearly articulated by the reigning queen (Rani Gouri Parvathi Bai) of Travancore as early as 1817, Dr Sen points out.

The practice of Kerala’s Nair community – once a substantial, prominent, and powerful social group in the State – giving women a high position in property ownership clearly influenced the appreciation of women’s rights and positions in Kerala society in general, says Dr Sen.

Definition

It is in keeping with this tradition that the LDF Government has now embarked on “gender budgeting”, which leads to what has been variously called “gender responsive budget (GRB)” or “gender sensitive budget (GSB)”.

A “gender budget”, according to Kerala’s feminist economists, is “not a budget for women but one which seeks to break down or disaggregate the government’s usual or mainstream budget according to its impact on girls/boys, women/men through a variety of tools designed for the purpose.”

The Union Government’s Ministry of Women and Child Development stresses that gender budgeting is not an accounting exercise, but an ongoing process of keeping gender perspective in policy/ programme formulation, implementation and review.

It exhorts State governments to extend the gender-based review to all levels of governance – at the level of the Centre, the State, districts, cities, towns and villages, as well as public sector units, autonomous bodies and other beneficiaries of public expenditure. A gender budget exercise seeks to identify and incorporate the myriad needs of women in various sectors, and provide sufficient budgetary allocation to address these needs in terms of projects or schemes.

The Directorate General of Human Rights of the Council of Europe defines gender budgeting as “an application of gender mainstreaming in the budgetary process. It means a gender-based assessment of budgets, incorporating a gender perspective at all levels of the budgetary process and restructuring revenues and expenditures in order to promote gender equality”

“Public budgets are not merely economic tools,” it goes on to add, “but summarize policies in monetary terms and express political priorities. Budgets, therefore, are not gender-neutral. They affect women and men in different ways, reflecting the uneven distribution of power within society as economic disparities, different living conditions and ascribed social roles. Gender budgeting seeks to make the gender impact of budgets visible and to transform them into an instrument increasing gender equality.”

Gender Board

As a prelude to gender budgeting, last year the Kerala Government constituted a Gender Board – reportedly the first in the country – for better delivery of welfare measures for women and for the monitoring of policy initiatives to promote women’s rights and interests. The Board reportedly asked for at least 10 per cent of the State’s budget to be set apart for women-related programmes and activities.

On the eve of this year’s budget, it remains to be seen whether Kerala’s Finance Minister Thomas Isaac will meet the State’s women’s aspirations. In any case, Kerala’s gender budgeting exercise will go a long way to achieve the goals of gender equality, accountability, transparency and participation, efficiency and effectiveness, and good governance.

The writer can be contacted at kgkumar@gmail.com

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