DMEO pitches for Gender Budgeting Act

DMEO pitches for Gender Budgeting Act

News: Development, Monitoring and evaluation office (DMEO) (an attached office of Niti Aayog) has pitched in for the Gender Budgeting Act to the mainstream of gender-based budgeting across all ministries. According to the report, gender budgeting is not practised in most states and is also not captured for many schemes in different sectors.

What is Gender Budgeting?
• It refers to preparing budgets or analyzing them from a gender perspective.
• It is a powerful tool for achieving gender mainstreaming so as to ensure that benefits of development reach women as much as men.

Recommendations by DMEO:
• Focus on Transgender - Under report titled ‘Gender Mainstreaming in Governance’ it said there is a need to improve social acceptance of transgender persons in society.
• Encourages state government to increase allocation - The report recommended that the Ministry of Women & Child Development (MWCD) should encourage state governments to increase their budgetary allocation towards women and child development, protection and welfare schemes.
• Make available Gender-Disaggregated Data - Absence of such data makes it difficult to measure the true impact of the schemes resulting in poor strategy design.

Gender Budgeting and India
• India has a gender budget component since 2005-06 wherein schemes having allocations at least 30% for women is highlighted.
• Beijing declaration and platform for action 1995 recommended Gender Budgeting.
• Influenced both expenditure and revenue policies as India’s gender budgeting efforts is unique because they have not only influenced expenditure but also revenue policies (like differential rates for men and women in property and Income tax rates)
• Gender Budgeting Cells (GBC) has been mandated in each ministry/Department.
• India has shifted its focus from women’s development to women-led development.
• Over 1.7 lakh cr has been allocated for women-centric schemes under the gender budget 2022-2023, which is an increase of 5 per cent.