India's Gender Budget Statement — Two Decades of Gender-Responsive Budgeting Across the Union Government

India's Ministry of Finance directed all central ministries and departments to set up Gender Budgeting Cells by January 2005, and introduced the first Gender Budget Statement (GBS) with the Union Budget for FY2005-06. Published annually as part of the Expenditure Profile, the GBS classifies scheme-level allocations into Part A (schemes with 100% of outlay benefiting women and girls), Part B (schemes with 30–99% benefiting women), and, more recently, Part C (schemes with under 30% benefiting women).
The exercise has grown from around nine reporting ministries in its first year to 49 Ministries/Departments and 5 Union Territories in FY2025-26. The gender budget itself rose from 5.3% of the Union Budget in FY2023-24, to 6.8% (Rs 3.27 lakh crore, roughly 1.0% of GDP) in FY2024-25, to 8.86% (Rs 4.49 lakh crore, about 1.38% of GDP) in FY2025-26 — a 37.5% year-on-year increase and the highest share of GDP since the statement began.
Independent analysis tempers the headline growth. Policy Circle's review of the FY2025-26 statement found the rural housing scheme PMAY-G alone accounted for 51.9% of Part A spending, meaning the 'gender budget' is heavily concentrated in one programme rather than spread broadly; the Nirbhaya Fund for women's safety remains chronically underspent; and a newly announced women-entrepreneur scheme appeared as a late addition with no matching departmental allocation. Drishti IAS's analysis separately notes that MGNREGS, the rural employment scheme, credits only 33.6% of its budget as benefiting women even though women perform 59.3% of the person-days of work under it — evidence that the accounting methodology itself under- and over-counts different schemes. NIPFP economist Lekha Chakraborty, whose research helped originate India's gender-budgeting methodology, has separately cautioned that higher allocations do not by themselves guarantee higher or more effective spending.
The approach has been influential beyond the union level: UN Women Asia-Pacific, working with India's Ministry of Women and Child Development and the Asian Development Bank, has documented and compared Gender Budget Statement formats across the union government and nine Indian states, and Indian-style gender budgeting is cited in IMF and academic surveys as a reference model for other Asian countries.

Read the full analysis: https://www.policycircle.org/opinion/gender-budget-statement-2025-26/