Yediyurappa presents 'gender budget'

Bangalore, Mar 16 (UNI) In its maiden effort to address women's empowerment issues, Karnataka today came out with a gender budget, highlighting budget provisions for 2007-08 meant for women.

Keeping his promise made in last year's budget, Deputy Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa presented the gender budget in the State Assembly. It also involved carrying out an impact analysis of the Government programmes and its budgetary allocations on the overall socio-economic status of women.

He said it was the intention of the Government to consider aspects of beneficiary class identification for a meaningful analysis of the incidence of public expenditure and facilitate evaluation of beneficiary impact for identified target groups.

The budgetary allocations had been classed into two categories, with the first one containing schemes where 100 per cent allocations for women have been identified and the second one containing schemes with more than 30 per cent allocations for them The gender budget was intended to serve as a reference point for future exercise to segregate budgetary provisions according to the gender of beneficiaries.

Under the first category, a total of Rs 394.40 crore under planned schemes and Rs 290.99 crore under non-planned schemes have been allocated exclusively for women. The allocations included Rs 2.4 crore for starting new ITIs exclusively for women, Rs four crore for women's university, Rs 21.41 crore for revolving fund under Shree Shakti schemes and Rs 225 crore for Bhagyalakshmi scheme.

UNI