Gender budgeting, also known as gender responsive and gender sensitive budgeting, was first formally introduced by the Australian Government in the year 1984. But unfortunately even after twenty decades, gender budgeting as a concept and as a tool has progressed minimally, especially in countries like India where its implementation is much needed.

Discrimination is viewed as a mere reflection of statistics and hence often the remedy is measured in terms of an improvement in numbers, figures and charts. Policy makers fail to see that these numbers themselves are a reflection of a cause, a phenomena much deeper, ingrained and well hidden. These undesirable statistics are but a [...]

If the previous generations grew up with the idea that a woman’s ultimate joy in life is waiting on her husband, this generation is being fed ideas of a ‘liberated’ woman– a woman who has all the freedom to roam the city, delightfully competing with peers to spend her father’s or husband’s money on clothes and manicures

The world citizenry is thankful that the ‘global’ leaders could at least agree to set deadlines to curb problems such as poverty and illiteracy, through the declaration of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in September, 2000. They are pressing problems indeed but so is climate change, but what differentiates the two is that programmes like Garibi Hatao have an immediate positive impact on vote banks coupled with a lesser short run negative impact on the ‘growth’ rates of economies, whereas climate change agenda has neither mass appeal nor does the competing economies any good by slowing down the growth process to a more humane level. A common wo/man after all may not have the patience to try and understand the trade off between growth and development and if it does not capture the imagination of the mass, the agenda does not qualify even for mere paper plans; irrespective of the extent of good it can do the non understanding people. They are politicians after all, not messiahs. But yes, the world citizenry is thankful to its leaders for stepping beyond their White Houses and limousines, or did they?

Four States have already implemented the fifty percent reservation in their Panchayats – Bihar, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Ironically Bihar is among the lowest scorers in the Gender Development Index (GDI), but we also need to keep in mind that Uttarakhand has shown a tremendous improvement in GDI. It is close to impossible to establish a cause and effect relationship in these cases. Hence it is time that we drop the arguments and go beyond mere squabbling. When we could go ahead at a tremendous speed with the nuclear agreement with the US, even let bloody civil wars happen over SEZs, why are we hesitating to implement reservation for women and correct the loopholes along the way, rather than waste time coming up with new arguments each day. It could hardly cause a percent of devastation that speedy, faulty construction of bridges do!

The whole issue reverberates with a promising new angle to the new age feminist movement – that women are not the problem but can be the solution to some of the seemingly unbeatable problems in the world like poverty. It presents a picture of progressive cycle in which economic empowerment coupled with political and social empowerment of women will lead to an improvement in the position of women in the social strata and this in turn will further the process of development in the whole world and the cycle continues.

Certain pockets of the society feel it unjust to have a law exclusively for women and hence demand a law for men too. The need for an exclusive law arises due to the sheer number of women who are treated badly in their own homes. How many times have we heard about husbands having cigarette burn marks or being beaten up by their fathers in law or being ill treated for dowry!

Be it elders at home or authorities in college, they take particular care to point out how to keep oneself away from trouble – dress modestly, reach home before it gets dark, avoid walking alone on lonely streets. I do not remember ever being taught to face trouble. Why aren’t we advised to walk boldly, daring a passerby to even try looking at us in an undesirable manner? Why aren’t we taught self defence instead of being forced to feel threatened to walk the streets?

It is highly frustrating (not shocking) that our focus is on all the wrong aspects and the wrong people. Why doesn’t the cruelty of rape jerk us? Instead of viewing the case of celebrity rapes as an opportunity to send a warning to the society by meting out the severest of punishments, we further propagate the idea that rape is fun and is not that bad an affair if caught when money’s there to bail one out!

That is when (I started reading that) I was struck. Struck nice and hard. Something slapped me out of my rosy dreams and welcomed me to the nightmare all around. I realised that I never felt discriminated, not because discrimination did not exist but because I was too used to it to perceive a difference. I never felt disadvantaged because I was immune to being crippled by the society, which conveniently turns womanhood into a handicap.