Why this budget is appropriate, timely
tion and infrastructure, which are positive growth multipliers.
Second, agriculture has been a dominant concern. The multiple initiatives outlined in the budget include a substantial increase in the Minimum Support Price (MSP) and widening the coverage to include many other crops, which would enhance both immediate farm income and assure wider security to farmers. The NITI Aayog in consultations with state governments will put in place a foolproof mechanism to ensure that farmers are benefited. Enhancing the MSP and extending its coverage could have inflationary impact, but that can be mitigated through improved supply-side response. Of course, the inflationary bias can constrain the options of the Monetary Policy Committee. The renewed emphasis by Operation Green through diversification of income through agroprocessing sector and also emphasis on horticulture, fisheries and animal husbandry is consistent with this broad approach. Linking Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMCs) with eNAM would provide improved marketing and linkages. While the thrust on agriculture is understandable, this would need to be supplemented by a continued emphasis on irrigation, improving the shelf life of perishable products and linking the additional allocation on roads with assured market access. The initiative of soil testing programmes with optimum mix of fertilisers deserves greater priority. Besides no other area necessitates greater compact with states than these multiple initiatives both in their design and the implementation.
Third, health. Historically, unlike education, the per capita expenditure in the health sector was significantly below acceptable international averages. This budget does make a decisive change. The flagship national health protection schemes are designed to cover 10 crore poor and vulnerable families (500 million beneficiaries to provide coverage up to Rs 5 lakh per family). This will be the world’s biggest health insurance initiative. It brings us quite close to the concept of universal health care — missing matrix in our development strategy. Recognising the need for adequate number of doctors, setting up 24 new government colleges and ensuring at least one medical college in every three parliamentary constituency and one government medical college in each state complements the need to provide skilled manpower and supporting infrastructure.
This will improve the affordability and quality of health care. Given the spread of tuberculosis, the allocation of Rs 600 crore for TB patients for nutritional support and cost of medicine should have been implemented much earlier. All these need calibration and wider consultations with all stakeholders over the coming months to align them to our needs and capacities.
Education: We know that while the Right to Education Act guaranteed access, the education outcomes continued to deteriorate. The absence of trained teachers and the need for a robust teacher training programme remained a dominant concern. The flawed RTE, while emphasising compulsory access and prescribing the necessary infrastructure, did little to address the issue of teacher training. The budget recognises the need to treat
Eeducation holistically without segmentation from pre-nursery to Class 12 and also training of teachers through integrated B.Ed programme.
However, revamping our education system needs more fundamental reforms. Linking skill education and pedagogic changes to align education to not the jobs of today but the jobs of tomorrow, deserves fresh thinking. For one, we do not precisely know the jobs of tomorrow. We do, however, know that the current pedagogy is unsuitable and in inculcating a mindset to relearn, and retrain since fixed jobs will inevitably yield place to multiple jobs. This Budget is appropriate and timely. In a sense, it combines political opportunism with economic compulsions.
The Economic Survey 2017-18 reports that India’s performance has improved on 14 of 17 indicators of women’s agency, attitudes, and outcomes, over the past 10-15 years. However, women continue to lag behind men in terms of key indicators such as education, economic opportunities, and health, and a large proportion faces violence, discrimination and harassment. Besides being intrinsically undesirable, gender disparity is known to negatively influence economic growth. The budget is an opportunity to demonstrate commitment towards gender equality and ensure sufficient financial allocation to help translate intent into action and ultimately impact.
Based on the recognition that national budgets benefit women and men differentially, and may even reinforce patriarchal social norms and biases, India formally adopted Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) in 2005-06. GRB does not merely involve earmarking of funds for women; it is an exercise that scrutinises the budget through a gender lens. The Gender Budget Statement comprises two parts: Part A reflects women-specific schemes with 100% allocation for women, and Part B is constituted by pro-women schemes wherein at least 30% of allocation is for women.
Overall, the Gender Budget allocation for FY 2018-19 is ₹121,961 crore. While in absolute terms, this is an increase from ₹113,311 crore (₹117,222 crore revised estimate) in 2017-18, as a percentage of total expenditure it continues to be in the range of 5%. To boost women’s formal sector employment and take-home earnings, provident fund contributions by them have been reduced from 10-12% to 8% for the first three years of employment. The allocation for Mudra Yojana, which provides entrepreneurship loans to those who may not otherwise be able to access funds, has been raised from ₹2.44 lakh crore to ₹3 lakh crore. At present, 76% of Mudra loan accounts are held by women. The proposed flagship health protection scheme is expected to generate lakhs of jobs, particularly for women.
The target of providing free LPG connections to poor women to safeguard them from the adverse health effects of smoke from unclean cooking fuel has been stepped up from five crore to eight crore, under the Ujjwala Yojana. While announcing the target of building another two crore toilets, the finance minister emphasised the positive effects of sanitation facilities for the dignity of women. The budget speech focused heavily on agriculture and rural economy but did not take cognisance of the trend of feminisation of the farm sector, except to say that women selfhelp groups will be encouraged to take up organic farming.
It is pertinent to note that the allocation of funds for schemes for women empowerment is not enough in itself, as often, actual expenditure falls far short of allocated funds. For instance, in the 2015-16 budget speech – the last one to explicitly mention women’s safety and security, the finance minister provided an additional ₹1,000 crore to the Nirbhaya Fund. Official documents on the status of implementation of budget announcements show that by January 2016, only ₹24.62 crore of expenditure had been sanctioned under the fund.
It is crucial that equal attention is given to the design of schemes and their timely, effective execution. India’s Union budgets report figures of actual spends with a lag of a year, disaggregated by ministries and schemes, but similar data is not provided for the Gender Budget even 13 years after its adoption.
Efforts need to be made to firmly institutionalise GRB within the government at the national and sub-national levels, and strengthen capacity to apply a gender analysis to implementation, and monitoring and evaluation – including expenditure tracking and benefit incidence. Without these steps, the budgetary exercise will continue to bear hues of ‘blue’ for women.