Gender Budgeting

Abstract

Women empowerment has become the agenda of almost all countries around the world. For this a lot of initiatives have been made at national and international level. Gender budgeting is a new mechanism to empower women by main streaming the issue of gender budget within the macro economic theory. It is important to note that this mainstreaming is done not only in quantities terms that is flowing some resources towards women. Rather it is a qualitative phenomenon as well as it aims to understand gender issues by providing a gender lens to budgetary process and make the process gender sensitive. In this paper we are discuss gender budgeting in India and then analyses the trends of gender budgeting in the Ministry of Women and Child Development (W&CD). Gender budget is defined as “It is a variety of processes and tools aimed at facilitating an assessment of the gender impact of the government budgets”. Hence gender budget is the practical application of gender mainstream 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. It does not call for a sprat equal budget for women and men. Rather then it strives to make budget gender sensitive by adopting the various tool for gender main streaming. It enables to track the budget as it calls for monitoring, analysis, reformulation the budget. Thus equality, transparency, efficiency and accountability are its cardinal values.