GENDER RESPONSIVE BUDGET – AN INNOVATIVE TOOL OF WOMEN EMPOWERMENT

Gender discrimination, violence against women, female foeticide and infanticide remains a major issue around the world. Even after 75 years of its independence, India has been consistently ranked poorly on the Gender Gap Index (GGI) achieving a rank of 101 out of 135 countries. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promulgated by the United Nations look at balancing the social, economic and environmental sustainability and clearly outlines that all the goals are interdependent. The SDG Goal 5 in the Agenda 2030 promulgates gender equality and the empowerment of all females. Apart from this Goal, the eight of the seventeen goals of the SDGs talk about the welfare and protection of females. Gender Budgeting deals with formulation of gender-centric laws, rules, regulations, policies, programmes.; budgeting and allocation of scarce resources; implementation of the laid down policies; continuous feedback, monitoring, course correction and studying the impact of such policies; and subsequent follow-up to eliminate gender differences. Gender budgeting has a number of benefits like reduction of gender disparities, assessment of the requirements of women, better utilization of resources, understanding impact of budget etc. The Gender Budgeting faces a number of challenges which hampers its effective implementation. These include low budgetary allocation, skewed allocation, technical challenges, absence of gender disaggregated data etc. As the Secretary-General of the United Nations warned, “change is coming at a pace that is too slow for the women and girls whose lives depend on it”. Over the next 10 years, the world comity must come together as one so as to create an effective ecosystem for the empowerment of women. The Govt. of India and a number of Indian State Govt. have made considerable efforts to adopt this unique novel concept for emancipation of the women in our society. The commentary article tries to decipher the concept of Gender budgeting, its importance, various challenges it faces, effective implementation of the concept and the way forward.