Money isn't enough: Jaitley's budget reveals the real problem with women safety in India

‘Women empowerment’ is a favourite phrase for all finance ministers. Every year, whether it is Pranab Mukherjee, P Chidambaram or Arun Jaitley, the budget will have a few sentences of what the government plans to do to empower women. Never mind that the plans are never put into practice.

In this year’s budget too, Jaitley has announced some plans for women and their safety. “Women’s safety is a concern shared by all the honourable members of this House. We need to test out different approaches that can be validated and scaled up quickly,” he said in his budget speech on Thursday.

The finance minister said the government will be spending Rs 50 crore to ensure women security in public transport and Rs 150 crore to increase their safety in large cities.

Jaitley also proposed to set up “Crisis Management Centres” in all government and private hospitals in Delhi and said that the funding will be provided from the Nirbhaya Fund, a fund constituted by the UPA government after the horrific gangrape that kicked up an uproar in India and abroad about safety of Indian women.

Just how optimistic can one be about these plans? A close look at the budget proposals offer little reason for optimism.

The symbolic Nirbhaya fund had an initial corpus of Rs 1,000 crore. It remained unused for a year as the government couldn’t even decide what to do with the money. In the interim budget presented earlier this year, Jaitley’s predecessor Chidambaram allocated another Rs 1,000 crore, making it a Rs 2,000 crore fund.

The government’s plans were to use this fund to install closed circuit television cameras at important public places, GPS and emergency buttons in transport buses to link them with police stations, launch toll-free numbers and self-defence lessons for the women, and also create innovative tracking devices.

According to this Business Standard report , the UPA government had also set up pilot projects in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), Thiruvananthapuram, to develop “personal safety devices for women”.

However, activists told the newspaper that the projects were neither innovative or effective in preventing sexual violence.

Devices will do little to ensure safety of women, when the Indian mindset remains the same. The faster our government understands that, the better it is.

Jaitley did indeed speak in his budget speech about sensitizing people towards the concerns of the girl child and women. He said that the school curriculum must have a separate chapter on gender mainstreaming. Jaitley’s proposal to launch Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana was also cheered. At least this Finance Minister had given some thought to the education of the girl child.

“It is a shame that while the country has emerged as a major player amongst the emerging market economies, the apathy towards girl child is still quite rampant in many parts of the country,” Jaitley said in his budget speech while announcing a special small savings instrument for the girl child and for their ’education and marriage’.

Why is it that when it’s a girl, the parents savings are meant for her marriage? Why is it that we don’t talk about saving for a boy child’s marriage? Is it because we presume that even decades from now, a bride’s family will have to bear the entire burden for a wedding (and of dowry)? A boy’s parents only have to worry about his education and his future jobs?

A 2009 PLoS ONE study found 44.5 per cent of women aged 20-24 years in India were married as a teenager; 22.6 per cent of them were married before age 16 years. And, a third of them had no formal education. Do we care?

But, of course, Jaitley isn’t the only person who believe that savings for the girl child means saving for their marriage. Candidate Narendra Modi was once quoted as saying, “If a daughter is born, plant five trees along your farm and when she’s grown up you can sell the timber to fund her wedding.”

All these years of liberalization have brought progress on many fronts, but in terms of women’s safety we seem to be getting worse, not better as a society. Just to point out: The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) says reports of crimes against women in India such as rape, dowry deaths, abduction and molestation increased by 26.7 percent in 2013 compared to the previous year. The number of rapes in the country rose by 35.2 percent to 33,707 in 2013 - with Delhi reporting 1,441 rapes in 2013 - making it the city with the highest number of rapes.

And, these are just numbers of the reported crimes.

Government may create funds every year for women, but it is the attitudes that have to change. And as Jaitley’s speech reveals, it is the politicians who have to change their attitude first.