Centre’s incentives give women reasons to cheer
Budget 2018 gave a host of reasons for women across rural and urban centres to cheer as the Narendra Modi government announced a number of incentives for them.
In a move that is likely to help increase women employees’ take home salary, finance minister Arun Jaitley said on Thursday that their contribution to provident fund will be lowered from 12% to 8% even as the employers’ share would remain the sale.
Gender experts welcomed the proposal but maintained that the government also needed to address the more fundamental issue of increasing women’s participation in the workforce.
“As per the NSSO data, women’s workforce participation rate has declined by 0.5% per year during 2004-05 and 2011-12. This is because women do a lot of unpaid work, which prevents many of them from joining the workforce,” Dr Indira Hirway, professor of economics at Ahmedabad based Centre for Development Alternatives said.
Jaitley also expanded the ambit of government’s flagship Ujjwala Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, which seeks to provide free cooking gas to poor rural women, by increasing the number
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of beneficiaries from 50 million to 80 million. An additional budgetary support of ₹48 billion has been earmarked for the scheme in the budget.
Padmini Swaminathan, visiting professor, Council for Social Development, Hyderabad said inclusion of three crore more women under the scheme was a positive step but the government needed to also address why there were wide variations in outcome of the scheme across the country.
“What is the point of expansion unless we know the reasons for poor outcomes in several parts of the country and relatively better outcomes in other?” she asked.
The overall fund allocation for the Union women and child development (WCD) ministry saw an increase of 16.3 % — from ₹ 21,236 crore in 2017-18 to ₹24,700 crore in 2018-19.
Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, another one of PM Modi’s pet programmes, saw an increase in fund allotment from ₹200 crore in 2017-18 to ₹ 280 crore .“The increase in allocation is a positive sign but the government needs to ensure that the schemes are implemented properly and the funds allocated are spent,” said former Panjab University professor Pam Rajput.
Jaitley also announced an increase in the allocation of National Rural Livelihood Mission to ₹5,750 crore in 2018-19, a large portion of which goes towards providing loans to women Self Help Groups (SHGs).