This article takes a closer look at the gender budgeting statement in the Union Budget 2007-08 in India and reveals that programmes and allocations remain plagued by mistakes, with several schemes wrongly prioritised as being exclusively for women. Economic and Political Weekly April 21, 2007

This report highlights the work carried out by UNIFEM and its partners throughout the lifetime of the project, Local Level Gender Responsive Budgets Initiatives. The overall objective of the programme was to advocate for and support the transformation of economic governance and leadership into a more gender responsive governance in order to improve gender equality and increase women's participation in decision making process that shape their lives.

This report presents the findings of a country review carried out in India by Benita Sharma and Aruna Kanchi under the programme "Integrating gender responsive budgeting into the aid effectiveness agenda" launched by UNIFEM and the European Commission (EC) in 2008.The report discusses the use of and opportunities for Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) tools and strategies in national level processes and instruments, including utilization of external assistance in the light of India. The first section of the report introduces the subject and describes the methodology.

This paper is an attempt to measure the effectiveness of Gender Budgeting as a tool for women empowerment. In recent years, Gender Budget Initiatives have emerged as an effective way to bridge gender gaps. First step towards this goal was taken by Australia, South Africa and Philippines followed by other developed and less developed countries including India.

The article examines the two main strategies adopted by the Government of India for institutionalizing gender responsive budgeting to highlight what has gone wrong and what needs to be fixed in order to achieve better outcomes for women. This article by Yamini Mishra and Navanita Sinha was published in Economic and Political Weekly.

This paper was prepared as a background to the UNDP Oslo Governance Centre and Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) International workshop on engendering and empowering governance indicators, New Delhi, April 2005.

This article by J. Vanishree (2008) focuses on the experiments carried out by Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu on Gender Responsive Budgeting and Local Governance. Even though many studies show that decentralized local governance is struggling to establish itself as a self governing institution, experiments from selected Indian states show that the potential can be unleashed.

The article draws attention to the numerous assumptions relating to the proportion of allocations under a scheme that directly benefits women which unfortunately form the basis of the Gender Budgeting exercise. Several of these assumptions seem unrealistic and such unacceptable assumptions weaken the relevance of this particular Gender Budgeting exercise.