Gender, child, climate... a budget of many firsts

Bhubaneswar: The state government’s budget for 2020-21 was unique in many ways. From gender budget to child budget and nutrition budget, the government took some novel initiatives. Besides, presenting a paperless budget, Odisha is the first state to conduct a climate code budgeting that provides accounts of tracking public expenditure on climate change.
“The adverse impact of climate change on human lives, environment and economics can exacerbate difficulties for the entire world. The state government is actively adopting strategies supported by appropriate public finance policies to deal with climate change risks,” the budget pointed out.
“Empowerment of women as well as rights and holistic development of children is one of the major development agenda of our government,” it stated. Gender budget refers to mainstreaming gender in design, implementation and evaluation of financial allocations across all government expenditures as per the needs and concerns of women.
Similarly, child budget is a pubic finance management strategy which analyses the responsiveness of the government budget to the rights and needs of children. “Child budgeting is an accountability mechanism to incorporate child needs into policies, programmes and interventions. The state government has developed the state budget with more child specific, child sensitive policies and provisions,” finance minister Niranjan Pujari said.
Through nutrition budget, the state government has tried to assess the required allocation of public funds for improving the nutritional standards and health status of the population. Nutrition budget statement with support from UNICEF covered information and analysis on all nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive schemes across the departments.
EoM