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Gender on your plan
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Women’s rights activist N. Hamsa talks about the need for a gender sensitive annual budget
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Rallying for a cause N. Hamsa, Executive Director, WomenPowerConnect, at her New Delhi office
Budgets come, budgets go. An essential governmental exercise, year after year, we all know. But how much of its annual allocation is ‘good practices’ in ‘gender mainstreaming’ seems to be under increased scrutiny now from wome
n organisations and related pressure groups. A little chat with N. Hamsa, Executive Director of one such organisation, WomenPowerConnect, points at some movement in this regard.
Momentum
Representatives of WomenPowerConnect, an umbrella organisation of over 500 women organisations, academic institutions and women leaders recently met the Finance Minister, a routine act before the Union Budget is tabled in Parliament. But what popped up at the meeting is but a newer term increasingly gaining momentum, gender budgeting. “We met up with the Finance Minister some days ago and submitted our recommendations to make our budget gender-sensitive. He has promised to look into them, it was a worthwhile meeting,” says Hamsa.
Flipping through the two-page recommendation at her New Delhi office, she says, “Though it is a routine thing for the Finance Minister to meet various pressure groups before the Budget, we requested his office to make it a practice to regularly discuss threadbare gender-focussed allocations so that funds could be allotted to the much-deserving needs.” Also, what they “stressed on was the need to define what should be the role of civil society bodies.”
Hamsa’s organisation is involved in gender-sensitive exercises with a few State Governments. “We recommend gender-sensitive allocation of funds to various State Administrations. It is nice to see that the term, gender-sensitive is generally catching up in the governmental corridors. More and more officials are aware of it and in some States particularly, one can see the difference due to the right initiatives,” she states. In this regard, Hamsa and her colleague, Kanta Singh talk particularly about the Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh Governments’ gender-specific programmes. “In most States, gender-specific programmes suffer because they have a top-down approach, unlike States like Kerala and Karnataka where gender-sensitivity has percolated to the lower levels,” says Singh, adding, “Most often we see that there is no dearth of funds for gender-specific programmes but where it fails is in not knowing how to spend it intelligently.” Corruption, she feels, is an issue but not the only issue.
What WPC has now recommended these two Governments “is to release money every quarter unlike the earlier practice of releasing the whole amount on April 1, and take stock of the progress made with funds spent that quarter.”
Among many other recommendations to the Union Government concerning women health, education and economic growth, etc, the organisation has suggested insurance policies for elderly women, specially widows, implementation of laws like the Domestic Violence Act and the PCPNDT Act.
Whether any of them bears fruit could be seen this Friday when the Union Budget will be unfolded at Parliament.
SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
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