Gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) :

GRB refers to the analysis of the impact of actual government expenditure and revenue on women and girls as compared to men and boys. It neither requires separate budgets for women, nor does it aim to solely increase spending on women-specific programmes. Instead, it helps governments decide how policies need to be adjusted, and where resources need to be reallocated to address poverty and gender inequalities.

For more details log on to http://www.gender-budgets.org/content/view/13/214/

Allocations for women development in India - Budget Speech 2009-10 by Pranab Mukherjee :

Empowerment of Weaker Sections :

The Swarna Jayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojna (SGSY) is being restructured as the National Rural Livelihood Mission to make it universal in application, focused in approach and time bound for poverty eradication by 2014-15. Stress will be laid on the formation of women Self Help Groups (SHGs). Apart from providing capital subsidy at an enhanced rate, it is also proposed to provide interest subsidy to poor households for loans upto Rs. one lakh from banks.

The Women’s Self Help Group movement is bringing about a profound transformation in rural areas. There are today over 22 lakh such groups linked with banks. Our objective is to enrol at least 50% of all rural women in India as members of SHGs over the next five years and link these SHGs to banks.

The Rashtriya Mahila Kosh has been working towards the facilitation of credit support or micro finance to poor women and has developed a number of innovative schemes for their benefit. In recognition of its role as an instrument of socio-economic change and development, the corpus of the Kosh, which at present is Rs.100 crore, would be raised to Rs.500 crore, over the next few years.

Female literacy :

The low level of female literacy continues to be a matter of grave concern. It has, therefore, been decided to launch a National Mission for Female Literacy, with focus on minorities, SC, ST and other marginalised groups. The aim will be to reduce by half, the current level of female illiteracy, in three years.