Engendering Budgeting and Gender Inclusive Urban Governance in India

Gender budgeting has been internationally recognized as a key tool for empowering women by incorporating gender perspective and concerns at all levels and stages of development planning, policy, programmes and delivery mechanism. Government of India has adopted budgeting for gender equity as a mission statement and is widely disseminating tools and strategies across ministries and departments. The importance of gender budgeting has been stressed time and again in different forums. Gender Budgeting refers to a method of looking at the budget formulation process, budgetary policies and budget outlays from the gender lens. In 1984, Austria introduced the first gender budget. Taking budgets as essential instruments for promoting gender equality, pioneering analysis of the impact of public budgets on gender relations was carried out. Since then, more than 90 countries have adopted gender budgeting as a tool for women empowerment and engendering development. In India too, many states, local governments, corporate houses and private agencies have initiated gender budgeting and have introduced specific policies, programmes and schemes for gender mainstreaming. Gender perspective in urban governance in India was initiated in 1992 when 74^th Constitutional Amendment Act made provision for one third reservation in the seats of municipal elections which was extended up to 50 percent in some of the states. International agencies such as World Bank, ADB and DFID also emphasized on gender mainstreaming in planning and implementation of urban development policy, programmes and schemes. Against this view point, present paper purports to examine the engendering budgeting and gender inclusive urban development in India.