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| Gender Budgeting— A Tool for Women Empowerment Hafiza Muzaffar | | J&K State Commission for Women | | Hafiza Muzaffar Secretary | 4/28/2011 9:04:30 PM |
| The Constitution of India guarantees equality for both men and women. However, the reality on the ground is different. A range of indicators confirm that women do not enjoy equality with men economically, socially or politically.
Women represent 48% of the total population of our country and comprise its valuable human resource, continue to face disparities. The poor status of women reflects and the indicators of the reflection are poor health, less education, high mortality rate, violence against women. It is due to little or no access to fruits of development.
The budget is the most important policy instrument of the government because no other policy will work without money. As such, the government budget can be a powerful tool in transformation in our State. The achievement of human development is heavily depend on the development and empowerment of women and girls who according to the census 2001 account for 48% of the total population of our country.
Gender budgeting has been Internationally recognized as a key tool for empowering women by incorporating gender perspective and concerns at all levels and stages of the development planning, policy, programme and delivery mechanisms. Gender budgeting is a methodology to access government to incorporate a gender perspective into budget as a key State plan for public expenditure. It can, for example, directly promote women’s development when funds are allocated for programmes that address women’s economic, social and other needs. Gender budgeting is an important tool for women’s empowerment and as a way of addressing observed inequality.
The State Governments commitment is to promote gender equality
Thus the Gender budgeting can identity the;
•felt needs of women and re-prioritising and/ or increasing expenditure to meet needs of women
•To strengthening civil society participation in economic policy making
•Tracking public expenditure against gender and development policy commitments.
A gender-responsive budget is a budget that acknowledges the gender patterns in society and allocates money to implement policies and programmes that will change these patterns in a way that moves towards a more gender equal society. Gender budget initiatives are exercises that aim to move the country in the direction of a gender-responsive budget.
GB initiatives are known by a range of different names. They have, for example, also been referred to as ‘women’s budgets’, ‘gender-sensitive budgets’, and ‘applied gender budget analysis’. It can help to improve economic governance and financial management, and can provide feedback to government on whether it is meeting the needs of different groups of women and men, girls and boys. These different groups might be rich and poor women and men, those from different castes and tribes, those from rural and urban areas, young, old, and so on.
During the last decade, a number of international meetings have been convened that have the potential for transforming the reality of women’s lives. At many of these meetings government, including Government of India, have committed to taking action to improve the situation of women. The following are among the international commitments to which Government of India is party:
•The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which Government of India signed in 1980.
•The World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna (1993) asserted that women’s rights are human rights.
•The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo (1994) placed women’s rights and health at the centre of population and development strategies.
•At the Fourth World Conference of Women in Beijing (1995) governments declared their determination “to advance the goals of equality, development and peace for all women everywhere in the interest of all humanity”.
•In the 1995 Commonwealth Plan of Action on Gender and Development governments declared their vision of a world “in which women and men have equal rights and opportunities in all stages of their lives”.
The reality is that women in India continue to face disparities in access to and control over resources. Thus the Gender Budgeting work provides information that allows for better decision-making on how policies and priorities should be revised- and the accompanying resources needed- to achieve the goal of gender equality.
Gender Budgeting recognises the unpaid care economy- the work that mainly women do in bearing, rearing and caring for their families and the people in our society. Gender Budgeting recognises that unless this unpaid care work is done, the economy will not function effectively and people’s well-being will be very negatively affected. Government therefore needs to find ways of supporting those who do this unpaid care work, lessening their burden, and ensuring that the work is done well.
Gender Budgeting does not mean a separate budget for women, but a tool for gender mainstreaming in the development process as a whole. As such, it needs also to be applied in areas such as agriculture, power, defence, commerce, and information technology where the gender implications may not be immediately apparent.
The J&K State Commission for Women, whose mandate is to protect and promote interests of women, has taken various initiatives to bring Gender budgeting to the forefront in the State. The Commission held various consultations/workshops during 2009. The trainings for gender budgeting were held at State/Divisional level. The Commission has now taken up the responsibility to train the District level officers regarding the concept, understanding and implementation of Gender budgeting. Till now eight districts of Jammu Division has been covered, where more than 360 District Officers of different district were imparted training. The Commission’s mission is to undertake these training-cum-workshops at every district of the State so that State plan is engendered. The discussions and insisting upon quantifiable outcomes for women and men be reflected in State plans. For these workshops, the resource persons were drawn from Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai and Orissa from reputed organizations already identified by the Finance Ministry, Government of India. The necessary assistance for conducting these workshops has been extended by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India, New Delhi.
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