New Delhi: The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) hosted a workshop for Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) in order to make university staff aware about gender mainstreaming. As per sources, officials from the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD) convened the workshop. Further, sources told that the MWCD Officials organized the workshop to publicize the gradations of GRB and expose its advantages amongst the participants.
Moreover, sources told that the workshop intends to provide knowledge amongst the decision making personnel of IGNOU regarding mainstreaming of women by using Gender Budgeting (GB) as a tool. The workshop had three technical sessions, sources added. The three sessions were hosted by Paramita Majumdar (MWCD), Asha Kapur Mehta, IIPA, New Delhi and Swapna Bisht, Trainer, GB, sources informed.
In addition, sources told that Vinita Agarwal, Director, Gender Budgeting, MWCD, showed a presentation based on the concept. She said that GB is a tool to translate gender commitments into budgetary commitments. It is an ongoing process which doesn’t seek a separate budget, she added. Besides, she said that it is a tool to analyze if government and public sector budgets are prepared and spend keeping gender perspective in mind.
Paramita Majumdar from MWCD said that in the ninth plan, the government made a commitment of allocating 30pc of its budget for women development schemes through women’s component plan within each department. She added that the preliminary study of the budget of government of India 2000-01 shows that only six of 45 ministries actually have schemes exclusively aimed at women and the budgets that directly focus on women constitute only one per cent of the total budget.
At the end, Ms. Majumdar said that it is important to bring awareness among all stakeholders to accelerate the process by operationalizing gender mainstreaming and gender budgeting.
