Women’s Empowerment through Gender Budgeting: A Review in Indian Context

Citation:

Reddy, Suguna. 2011. “Women’s Empowerment Through Gender Budgeting: A Review in Indian Context.” Asia Pacific Journal of Social Sciences 3 (1): 210-24.

Author: Suguna Reddy

Abstract:

Gender Budgeting is now recognized as a tool for empowering women. Budget impacts women’s lives in several ways. It directly promotes women’s development through allocation of budgetary funds for women’s development programmes and reduces opportunities for empowerment of women through budgetary cuts. The Budget is an important tool in the hands of state for affirmative action for improvement of gender relations through reduction of gender gap in the development process. It can help to reduce economic inequalities, between men and women as well as between the rich and the poor. (NCAS, 2003). Hence, the budgetary policies need to keep into considerations the gender dynamics operating in the economy and in the civil society. There is a need to highlight participatory approaches to pro-poor budgeting, green budgeting, local and global implications of pro-poor and pro-women budgeting, alternative macro scenarios emerging out of alternative budgets and inter-linkages between gender-sensitive budgeting and women’ s empowerment. Serious examining of budgets calls for greater transparency at the level of international economics to local process of empowerment. With this background, the paper mainly focuses on the empowerment of women through Gender Budgeting.

Topics: Civil Society, Development, Economies, Economic Inequality, Poverty, Gender, Gender Budgeting Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: India

Year: 2011