Radha Malani, Sneha Mariam Thomas, and Zoyah Virani
Gender Budgeting in India has been positioned as a tool for policymakers to measure the quantum of budgetary resources that have the potential to empower women. Despite two decades of annual releases, the extent to which gender budgeting has translated into tangible outcomes remains unexamined. The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) comprises two-thirds of India’s Gender Budget Statement (GBS) over the last six fiscal years. Loopholes in the guidelines of PMAY, however, raise doubts about its inclusion in the GBS and the overall objective of gender budgeting in India.
What is Gender Budgeting?
Gender budgeting is a tool for policymakers to measure the quantum of budgetary resources that have the potential to empower women. It is not a separate or additive budget for women, but a method of examining the distributive logic of the state: who benefits from public spending, in which sectors, and with what implications for gendered disadvantage. The intellectual roots of gender budgeting lie in feminist economics and public finance reforms of the late twentieth century, which challenged the assumption that budgets are gender-neutral. Early experiments in Australia in the 1980s, followed by initiatives in South Africa, the United Kingdom, and several Latin American countries, demonstrated that routine fiscal decisions often reproduced structural inequalities unless explicitly examined through a gender lens. These global efforts were consolidated through the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, which urged governments to incorporate gender perspectives into all budgetary processes.
India’s adoption of gender budgeting drew on these international developments, and domestic research which championed its advantages. Persistent gender gaps in education, health, labour force participation, and access to public services highlighted the limits of ostensibly neutral welfare spending. The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy’s (NIPFP) seminal 2003 work analysed how government expenditure affected women differently across sectors and laid the analytical foundation for integrating gender considerations into the Union Budget. When the Government of India introduced the Gender Budget Statement (GBS) in 2005–06 under Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, it was positioned not as a symbolic gesture, but as an operational tool to identify the gender-disaggregated impact of policies and to inform the reprioritisation of public spending to reduce gender gaps.
Gender Budgeting in India
In practice, India’s gender budgeting exercise is anchored in the Gender Budget Statement (GBS), which classifies schemes into three parts. Part A includes women-specific schemes with 100 percent of allocations directed to women. Part B covers schemes where at least 30 percent, but not all, benefits are assumed to accrue to women. Part C, added in 2024–25, captures schemes where less than 30 percent of allocations are for women. Ministries self-report these schemes and respective classifications in the GBS, aiming to improve visibility of women-targeted spending. The government’s stated approach to consolidating the GBS included beneficiary-incidence analyses and revision of operational guidelines to expand women’s coverage under development schemes.
Over the years, India’s budgeted allocations under the gender budget have increased from 4.67% of GoI’s total expenditure in fiscal year 2005-06 to 9.37% in fiscal year 2026-27. However, India’s lack of good quality sex-disaggregated data makes analysing beneficiary-incidence and estimating women’s empowerment next to impossible. Thus, India’s GBS relies on assumed beneficiary shares rather than demonstrated outcomes and selectively tags schemes without interrogating their design or effectiveness. As a result, the current framework captures commitment in form, but only weakly measures transformation in substance.
PMAY’s Inclusion in the GBS
The limits of this classification logic become visible in the composition of Part A itself. Over the last six fiscal years, allocations under schemes listed as delivering 100 percent of benefits to women have nearly quadrupled. This apparent expansion is driven by a single scheme: the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY). Designed to provide pucca houses to households living in inadequate or informal conditions across rural (PMAY-Gramin) and urban (PMAY-Urban) areas, it is a large-scale housing and infrastructure programme. Its inclusion as a women-specific scheme rests primarily on the requirement that houses be registered in the name of a woman or jointly with a male household member- an administrative provision that allows the scheme to be classified as delivering 100 percent benefits to women. In recent budgets, PMAY alone accounts for roughly two-thirds of total Part A expenditure.
However, this classification rests on a narrow, formal notion of ownership that does not necessarily translate into substantive empowerment. Three features of the scheme’s design make this tension visible. First, an exception to the female-ownership requirement dilutes the scheme’s gender-affirmative intent. Second, PMAY’s stated outputs and outcomes are framed around housing delivery, with no explicit commitment to measurable improvements in women’s empowerment. Third, the scheme’s design does not confront the structural constraint of low female land ownership, which shapes women’s actual control over housing assets.
1) Ownership Exceptions and the Limits of the Female Titling Mandate
An explicit exception to the female ownership rule- permitting houses to be registered solely in a male member’s name where no adult female exists- has been widely used. Audit reports from the Comptroller and Auditor General reveal that in several states, up to 50 per cent of sanctioned PMAY houses were registered solely in the names of male household heads. In fact, PMAY’s own data corroborates this pattern. 16.79 lakh houses, 16% of the total sanctioned houses in PMAY-Urban, and nearly one-quarter of the sanctioned rural houses under PMAY-Gramin, are registered exclusively to men. The persistence of substantial male-only ownership indicates that women are neither the sole nor the primary asset holders across the scheme.
2) Output-Oriented Design and the Absence of Women-Centred Performance Metrics
PMAY’s scheme guidelines require that houses be owned or co-owned by an adult female member of the household. This formal ownership clause is treated as sufficient evidence that the entire allocation benefits women. However, the scheme’s actual targets and performance indicators are not framed around women’s asset ownership, control, or decision-making power. Instead, PMAY is designed primarily to address housing deprivation among specific socio-economic groups, such as: households without pucca houses, low-income urban families, or those identified through deprivation and vulnerability criteria in the Socio-Economic Caste Census. Progress is measured in terms of houses sanctioned, constructed, and delivered to these categories, not in terms of whether women acquire independent property rights, exercise control over the asset, or experience measurable gains in bargaining power. In this structure, female ownership functions largely as a rule of allotment layered onto broader socio-economic targeting, rather than as a central outcome around which the scheme is designed, monitored, or evaluated.
3) Land Ownership as a Structural Constraint
The lack of a measurable key performance indicator relating to female house ownership is even more telling in the context of the vast gap in women’s control and agency over fixed assets in the country. For example, PMAY-Urban’s Beneficiary Led Construction (BLC) component, accounting for 64.5 per cent of all houses sanctioned, provides financial assistance to households to construct or enhance pucca houses on land they already own. Thus, BLC’s eligibility is intrinsically tied to land ownership- a structural constraint in India, where only 8.5 per cent of women own land independently, 23.4 per cent own land jointly, and 68.3 per cent do not own land at all.
Limitations of the GBS
PMAY is emblematic of a broader pattern with the GBS– of schemes being listed arbitrarily under it, without the inherent gender logic being clear. For example, the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY), which provides free food grains to vulnerable populations, was included in Part B of the GBS in the 2025-26 budget. However, PMGKAY is not a new scheme, but only a new name for the food subsidy provided through the public distribution system. Its sudden inclusion in the GBS of 2025-26, inflated the total gender budget of that year. Similarly, the current gender budget’s Part C now has about 100 schemes. Until budget 2025-26, PM Kisan was the only scheme in Part C. Such large inclusions in the GBS happened without explanation.
The limitations of the Gender Budget Statement are rooted in its underlying theory of change. The Handbook on Gender Budgeting, released by the Ministry of Women and Child Development in 2015, recognises that gender-responsive policies require adequate financial allocations. Yet the framework continues to trace impact primarily from the size of budgetary commitments rather than from the outcomes they produce. As a result, the architecture of the GBS is built around scheme-level tagging rather than outcome-based assessment. Ministries classify programmes according to design features or assumed beneficiary shares, but there is no systematic mechanism to track whether these allocations translate into measurable improvements in women’s access to services, asset ownership, income, time use, or decision-making power.
Once classified, schemes are treated as equivalent within their category, regardless of their actual impact. A small, targeted intervention addressing gender-based violence and a large infrastructure scheme with a procedural ownership clause can both appear as “100 percent women-benefiting,” even though their pathways to empowerment and likely outcomes are fundamentally different. In this way, diverse policy logics are collapsed into a single accounting category. Since the size of the gender budget depends on how schemes are tagged, the inclusion of a few large mainstream programmes can significantly inflate the totals without any real shift in policy design or outcomes. Headline increases may therefore reflect administrative classification choices and not substantive changes in spending priorities. The system, in effect, records allocations rather than delivery, and design provisions rather than their enforcement. Variations in implementation, ownership patterns, or women’s actual control over benefits remain outside the scope of the exercise. The result is a system that signals commitment in budgetary form, but only weakly measures transformation in lived outcomes.
Conclusion and Way Forward
India’s GBS has succeeded in making women visible within the fiscal architecture of the state. Yet the analysis above suggests that its central limitation is not its policy intent, but its measurement design. PMAY illustrates how GBS functions largely as a reporting exercise, rather than as a tool that shapes scheme design, implementation, and evaluation. Its architecture privileges allocations over outcomes, and formal inclusion over measurable agency.
To create a shift in practice, primarily, the collection and reporting of gender-disaggregated data, and the analysis of what it means, nominally and fundamentally, for women’s empowerment, are required. This is in line with recommendations provided by the NIPFP in 2003, as well as studies conducted by the government and multilateral agencies across the years. The recurring nature of this recommendation points to a systemic failure in adopting outcome monitoring into policy-making.
The GBS must be transformed into a framework that mandates disaggregated, sector-specific impact monitoring, rather than merely cataloguing expenditures. Without reform, India’s gender budgeting will continue to serve as optics rather than drive meaningful socio-economic empowerment of women. Most importantly, it must be grounded in the lived realities of India’s women and aspire for a transformation in their socio-economic agency, not merely their inclusion in statistics.
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