Workers helped by the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), work at a construction site on the outskirts of Amritsar on July 23 | Photo credit: AFP
The story so far: Women-led development remains at the heart of the Finance Minister’s (FM) announcement in this year’s Budget. This commitment to women’s empowerment is reflected in the Budget allocation for pro-women programs, as reported by the Gender Budget Statement (GBS). GB reaches 1% of GDP forecast in 2024-25 for the first time, and overall allocation is now more than ₹3 lakh crore for pro-women programmes.
Why the increase?
GBS, since it was first introduced in 2005-06, has consistently reported an average share of 5% of the total budget allocation, with ups and downs. This year is special because the share of allocation for pro-women schemes is about 6.8% of the total budget expenditure for 2024-25, which is higher than the usual trend and a positive sign of the status quo.
The increase in GB allocation is driven by two factors. A part of this increase has been on account of the new Part included ‘C,’ the third part of the GBS that reports pro-women plans with less than 30% provisioning for women. The PM Kisan scheme in the agriculture sector has been notified under C section at a cost of ₹15,000 crore. This is 25% of the total cost of the program. The second factor contributing to the overall increase is the increase in the A section of the GBS. Part A reports expenditure on schemes with 100% allocation to women.
Part A was earlier to be 15-17% of the general allocation notified in GBS till BE 2022-23. From BE 2023-24, there is a sudden increase in the allocation in section A which raises the share of the pro-women scheme with 100% allocation for women to almost 40% (figure 1).
This is mainly due to the change in the report where the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) – rural and urban – began to be described in section A instead of section B. Section B of the GBS reports programs with an allocation of 30-99% for women. Therefore, only a part of PMAY was notified earlier. Since last year, the entire allocation of ₹80,670 crore under PMAY for 2024-25BE has been notified under section A, thereby increasing the allocation. The PMAY reporting may not be entirely accurate as not all beneficiaries are women.
Are there other instances of over-reporting/under-reporting?
Over-reporting can also be found in other cases such as the PM Employment Generation Program (PMEGP), which aims to help entrepreneurs create micro-businesses in the non-agricultural sector. The GBS reported an allocation of ₹920 crore or 40% of the total allocation to the PMEGP, without providing details on the report.
On the other hand, missing allocations often reduce the amount that programs do for women’s needs. For example, this year for the first time all allocations for the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) are reflected in section A of the GBS, indicating that 100% of the outlay is dedicated to women and girls, which is technically correct and necessary. it has been done before. In 2023-24BE, only 50% of the total outlay of the scheme is reflected in part B GBS. GBS this year also correctly reported an increased allocation for the Ministry of Electronics & IT. But it missed reporting pro-women allocations in schemes for women entrepreneurs such as PM Vishwakarma, SVANidhi, and Stand-Up India.
In another case, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), which has the third highest allocation among women schemes in GBS, is currently reported under B section with ₹28,888.67 crore which is 33.6% of the total expenditure. It is important to note that women make up 59.3% of all days in MGNREGA from December 2023, and should receive appropriate wages from the total MGNREGA budget, but only 33.6% are reflected in GBS.
What’s next?
This anomaly can be minimized by incorporating the explanation for the entries made in the GBS. Incorporating explanations for allocations in the GBS will not only ensure accounting accuracy but will assist in gender audits and pave the way for better gender outcomes in government programs. Several years of advocacy for better reporting on GBS by experts are reflected in the inclusion of the third section. The above reporting anomaly is a reflection of GBS that still does not have a scientific and systematic approach.
Efforts to reduce misreporting and improve the quality of GBS are visible, but there is still a long way to go. The need to include rational as well as to maintain detailed reports is not only an exercise to increase the number of reported allocations for the development of women – but to ensure real spending for women in all government programs, which are well planned and designed to include women. necessity from the beginning. Gender responsive budgeting is a powerful tool to close the gender gap in the economy.
Sona Mitra and Sruthi Kutty work with IWWAGE, a LEAD initiative at Krea University, and Sonakshi Chaudhry works at The Quantum Hub (TQH Consulting).
