Following a commitment by the Finance Minister of Karnataka to create a separate cell in the Finance Department tasked with identifying the quantum and resource allocation and expenditure for women, the first ever Gender Budget document was presented in the year 2007-08 at the Legislature with a hope to improve the sensitivity to address the issues which concerns women.

In India, Gender budgeting as a distinct tool was institutionalized by the introduction of gender budgeting statement in the Union Budget 2005-06. This paper tries to trace the steps taken in this direction by analyzing the pattern of resource allocation under gender budgeting with an in-depth analysis of schemes included in Union Budget 2007-08.

Gender Budgeting in India by Dr. Vibhuti Patel was presented at a National workshop on Gender Budgeting: An Effective Tool for Achieving Women's Empowerment, organised on 15-4-2007 by Equity Foundation, Patna and Supported by Planning Commission of India, Delhi.

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.

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.

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 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.

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...

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