Government think-tank Niti Aayog's monitoring and evaluation office DMEO has pitched for finalising a national policy for women and mainstreaming of gender-based budgeting across all ministries and states through formulation of the Gender Budgeting Act.
The Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO), an attached office under the NITI Aayog, in a report titled 'Gender Mainstreaming in Governance' also said there is a need to improve social acceptance of transgender persons in the society.
According to the report, gender budgeting is not practised in most states and also not captured for many schemes in different sectors.
"A Gender Budgeting Act (is needed) to mainstream gender-based budgeting across all ministries and states/Union Territories and legally mandate all data collecting institutions to analyse and publish gender-disaggregated statistics," it suggested.
Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels, it explained.
It is a strategy for making women's as well as men's concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated.
The report recommended that the Ministry of Women & Child Development (MWCD) should encourage state governments to increase their budgetary allocation towards women and child development, protection and welfare schemes to ensure improved fund availability and utilisation of schemes.
DMEO also emphasised on the need of 'finalising the National Policy for Women with revision in 2016 draft policy'.
The report noted that the absence of gender disaggregated data makes it difficult to measure the true impact of the schemes resulting in poor strategy design.
DMEO pointed out that only 62 out of 119 centrally-sponsored schemes are practising GB (Gender-based Budgeting).
"The best performing sector is WCD where all schemes are practising GB to the extent of 100 per cent women specific programmes. This is followed by RD and HRD sector," it said, adding that the worst performing sectors are jobs & skills and water resources, environment and forest, and climate change with GB being practised in none of the schemes.
(To receive our E-paper on WhatsApp daily, please click here. To receive it on Telegram, please click here. We permit sharing of the paper's PDF on WhatsApp and other social media platforms.)
