Beyond Gender Budgeting
A gender sensitive planning and laws, with in-built gender budgeting are
necessary for a new eco-socialism based on equality and freedom.
D.Gabriele
Gender budgeting has become a fashionable term in the present day discourse on
the economy. However, it is important to keep in mind that women by themselves
are not a "sector," but are divided into classes and castes and are
further divided by the religion specific personal laws. Besides, it is very
contestable whether attempts at "women's empowerment" or
"mainstreaming" can have lasting beneficial effects in a globalising
economy, which leads to more and more withdrawal of the state from social
responsibility, abolition of public sector employment, destruction of
agriculture through green revolution techniques and rising indebtedness of
peasants, free import of agricultural goods, destruction of workplaces through
mechanization in agriculture, construction labour, weaving etc. It is today
acknowledged that poor and lower middle class women have been hardest hit by LPG
policies, since over a decade. Gender budgeting therefore often amounts to an
attempt to introduce women specific programmes or at least pro-women programmes
in an adverse situation, where the general trend deprives women of workplaces
and access to natural resources like land, water and forest.
Dismantling Security
The truly distressing aspect of the first UPA budget in 2004 consisted in the
fact that it was nearly a verbatim copy of the Jaswant Singh interim budget of
Feb 2004. The NDA government had left 300 crores of funds unutilised which had
been allocated for poor women and children in the 2002-03 budget. This led to a
cut of 200 crores in the interim budget. The Chidambaram budget of 2004 upheld
this reduction in the funds allocated to the Human Resource Development
ministry. This led to drastic cuts in the allocation for Integrated Child
Development Schemes (ICDS) for the rural poor. The ICDS anganwadi scheme could
cover only 23 million children, while altogether about 60 million children in
fact need such services. Without child-care facilities, women's work
participation and elder sisters' school enrolment are badly affected. Thus this
trend is badly in need of reversal. Women welfare schemes had an allocation of
only 175 crores in the UPA budget of 2004, 37 crores less than in the NDA
interim budget. This cannot be justified by lack of funds. For rather
inexplicable reasons, the defense budget had been jacked up from 60,000 crores
to 77,000 crores. This means that somehow the priorities have gone wrong.
Some crucial areas that more severely affect women are food security, employment
and social security in the informal sector, health and general rise in violence.
In all these fields it is not only the money allocation as such but the policy
perspectives, which are of supreme importance. For example, as far as food
security goes, it was Mr. Chidambaram who first introduced the concept of
targeting in 1997, which has led to considerable dismantling of the Public
Distribution System (PDS). While the CMP endorsed the need to universalize the
PDS, the last budget aimed at targeted food stamp schemes as a pilot project -
an approach that has already proven to be a disaster in Andhra Pradesh. It is
women who suffer most from ration cuts, as they have to stand in queues, have to
make ends meet and chronically get less to eat anyway. Women need a perspective
change here as well as an allocation of funds.
The other policy issue of crucial importance is the formulation of the
Employment Guarantee Act (EGA) which was promised in the CMP, but the campaign
for which has run into considerable trouble due to the effort by the government
to water down successive versions to levels of meaningless dilution. The CMP of
the UPA government very prominently promised immediate enactment of an EGA,
which would provide at least 100 days of employment annually on assetcreating
public work programmes at legal minimum wages for at least one able bodied
person in every rural, urban, poor and lower middle class household. Failure to
provide employment within 15 days would entitle the person who seeks work to a
dole at half the legal minimum wage. Experiences in Maharashtra have shown that
women have benefited from the employment guarantee scheme (EGS) in that state
over many years. It was hoped that a generalized law could reverse some of the
negative effects of globalisation on agriculture, environment and rural
employment.
Whither Employment
In the mean time the Finance Ministry and the Planning Commission have drafted
an act which provides only for a narrowly targeted scheme, covering only BPL
households moving from district to district in entirely arbitrary ways, paying
any wage for any duration of time, putting a major burden on the state
government. The scheme can be withdrawn anywhere, anytime as the central
government pleases. It therefore does not provide a guarantee at all. By
definition it excludes all households which are supposed not to be "below
poverty line (BPL)." It is not also reliably linked at least to rural
minimum wages like the food for work programme or the Sampoorna Gramin Rojgar
Yojana (SGRY) nor to the All India Price Consumer Index for agricultural and
rural works (CPI-AL). The definition of the work that can be done has also been
narrowed down so that the panchayats may find it difficult to formulate suitable
schemes. Women as well as older people may find themselves unable to do the kind
of heavy earth moving works to which the new definitions are confined.
Women's organizations have pointed out that the definition of a household is
very wide on the base of a common ration card or common kitchen. There are no
safeguards in the scheme against exclusion of women who are most affected by the
decline in rural employment over recent years. The Act should ensure that at
least 40% of workers employed in any block are women. Otherwise, a large number
of women may be shoved on to the dole, which now the state government is
supposed to provide. If the Act is passed in the present form, it could spread a
regime of targeted wage flexibility in other government programmes, which
despite the pressures of WB and IMF has not been accepted so far in India. This
adverse trend regarding the EGA also has a negative effect on the campaign to
bring about full social protection for workers in the informal sector by
formulating an umbrella legislation. While the attempts of the UPA government
are considerably more promising than the toothless scheme that the NDA
government tried to offer, there is an attempt to bring all informal sector
workers under a centralized welfare board. However, in order to do justice to
different sub-sectors, decentralization of labour boards is a must. Finance
should be mobilized, as planned earlier, by putting a 2 paisa cess per litre of
petrol and diesel. Funds need to be made available for training programmes to
enable women to competently participate in panchayats and gram sabhas, as
well"as in the labour boards of the informal sector.
In health, attention has to be given to women's morbidity and mortality which is
closely connected with the above mentioned problems of destruction of - food
security and work places and resulting migration. Instead the trend of targeted
birth control has reemerged over recent years, which poses further risks to
women's health. Again, meaningful budgetary allocations would require a
rethinking on policies. The 1.37 lakhs rural sub-centres in India providing
primary health care need sufficient funds and personnel to provide accessible
low cost health care instead of being mostly used for targeted family planning.
In the present climate of commodification of natural resources, basic services
and human relationships, fragmentation of the social fabric, displacement and
violence are on the rise. It appears crucial in the present situation for
women's movements and organizations of workers in the informal sector, as well
as small peasants, agricultural labourers, dalits, adivasis, displaced people
and the tribals in the North- East, to join hands with struggles for peace and
disarmament in order to reduce military spending and violence in society and
clear the way for the development process which puts access to work, food and
livelihood resources for the mass of people as a high priority. A political
process towards a feminist eco-socialism needs to be built up, which consciously
overcomes caste and communal divides, unites workers and peasants and gives a
common focus to the aspirations for transformation in different sectoral
struggles.
Source: The People's Movement, News Magazine of the National Alliance of
People's Movement. Vol.2 No.1. Jan -Feb 2005