Budget 2013: Nirbhaya fund? Not what the Indian woman needs

While Finance Minister P Chidambaram played the knight in the shining armour role to the hilt, going all out to woo the Indian woman - with an all-woman bank, the ‘Nirbhaya’ fund and an empathetic lecture on the girl child- after the shock value wears out, we are only left with measures which at best might only scrape the tip of the iceberg that is women’s development and security in our country. Firstly, the all-woman bank. Chidambaram himself acknowledged in his speech there are women at the helm of several national and international banking operations. So, what exactly is the need of an all-woman bank? [caption id=“attachment_643755” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AFP.[/caption] It’s definitely to fund issues related to safety of women . Like the FM pointed out, it will create employment for women and help fund enterprises floated by women.  However, there is little that the budget had to encourage women to turn entrepreneurs. Kavita Krishnan of the AIPWA pointed out: “The idea of the bank is too unclear right now. He said nothing about what exactly the bank is supposed to do, apart from making a feel-good statement that is.” “Women in India don’t have the basic health facilities. Thousands of villages don’t have a single primary healthcare centre, there are no gynecologists, pregnancy deaths are so common, how will the bank help all these women? We immediately need a facility that helps detect the various forms of cancer women are susceptible to… women in villages don’t have any facility to detect the disease till it has spread fatally,” she said. The FM must have hoped to make just the right noises with announcing the Nirbhaya fund. However, not everyone is flattered. Doubts that the Rs 1,000 crore fund will just rot in the ministry coffers as a lazy bureaucracy takes ages to implement existent laws and tighten security measures seemed to have marred the declaration. “How is the Nirbhaya fund supposed to make me feel safe when I step out at night when I know it’s just a lot of money resting with people who have done little all these years,” said Delhi resident, 25-year-old Arpita Chakraborty. Krishnan says that the Nirbhaya Fund seems more like a corpus fund meant to be utilised when needed. She might be right, given what Chidambaram said during his speech was, “I urge the Ministry for Women and Child Development to figure out strategies to utilise this fund and make the country safer for women.” He didn’t specify and ‘strategies’ that the ministry wasn’t possibly sitting on all this while, waiting a Rs 1,000 crore fillip to arrive, right? Twitter was abuzz with suggestions that the fund might just turn into another opportunity for a scam. “Let them implement the Justice Verma report first. What about setting up the shelter homes and the safe houses. What about revamping the shelter homes which as as bad as jails for women already? What about trauma care centres for rape victims, acid attack victims? Is the Nirbhaya fund going to address all those needs?” asks Krishnan. She also points out that the Rs 200 crore allocation for ‘vulnerable’ women is also not very promising. “Vulnerable women aren’t essentially widows and sexual assault victims. There are so many middle class and lower middle class women who are the sole breadwinners for the family, what does the budget have for them?” Clearly, the FM has a few more questions to answer and this budget didn’t even address them.