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A recent government order calls on all departments to have a gender budget cell comprising six members and headed by the joint secretary of the department
The recent charter by the Union government for all its departments to have a gender budget cell may provide the big push needed for gender budgeting to work on the ground, says Manjula Krishnan, joint secretary at the Ministry of Women and Child Development. Gender budgeting was adopted as a concept in 1992, but action was taken only after 2000 when the finance ministry asked various government departments to monitor schemes that targeted women or spent at least 30% of the money allocated to them on women. Every Union budget since 2005-06 has carried a gender budget. The government has mandated special gender quotas for several of its development programmes. For example, a third of beneficiaries of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme have to be women. The recent government order calls on all departments to have a gender budget cell comprising six members and headed by the joint secretary of the department. Each cell will have to choose and view three to six schemes of the department or ministry from a gender perspective. The results of the monitoring will be factored in the outgoing budget that the finance minister presents at the end of each financial year. Gender audits cannot be carried out because the Union and state governments lack separate data on women. Government departments are now changing the way they report data, to become more gender specific. According to Krishnan, such collection of data will help change the design of the scheme or decide whether it should be adopted at all. For example, in 2004, scientists in Nagapattinam designed a special fishing net for widowed fisherwomen, after the tsunami; the net enables them to fish in shallow waters. In another example, data is being collected on how many girl-children are being brought to immunisation centres. Subsequently, the government hopes to come out with incentives that will motivate mothers to bring both boys and girls for immunisation. India needs to show improvement on the gender budgeting front. For 2007-08, gender budgeting mentions a total of Rs 31,178 crore -- that's equivalent to just 4.6% of the government's total expenditure. The only state that presented a budget purporting to be gender-sensitive was Madhya Pradesh which has a poor sex ratio of 916 women for 1,000 men. Besides announcing a scheme whereby girls over the age of 14 will be given cycles in backward regions so that they can attend school, Madhya Pradesh announced the setting up of a special education zone for women in four of the state's cities. It also said that Rs 1.42 crore was being earmarked to implement new laws aimed at curbing domestic violence. Source: www.Livemint.com, April 24, 2007
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