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The experience of working alongside a state government at the time of budget preparations is truly a unique one. While we, as a civil society organisation, are more familiar with the flurry of post budget presentation analysis and critique, being a part of the process sheds light on the intricacies of the Government procedure itself. The opportunity came as part of a capacity building project on child budgeting with UNICEF for the Government of Assam.

Assam’s child population has been consistently marred with higher than average rates of Infant, Under-5 and Maternal Mortalities. For addressing these effectively, adequate resources and in turn, their proper utilisation are crucial. As a step in this direction, budgeting for children has been taken up by the state as one of their priorities in the last two years as part of their endeavour to fulfill the Assam Vision 2030. The encouraging dimension of this is that instead of just looking at it as an annual accounting exercise, Assam has shown the willingness to orient their departments not only towards child responsive budgeting but also in budgeting for other vulnerable sections of the population like the elderly, persons with disabilities and women. Recognising the inter-sectoral nature of these reforms, the state has further set up a dedicated unit called the Inclusive Budget Cell, with a mandate to institutionalise and strengthen the state’s efforts in budgeting for these recognised population groups. The concerned project child budgeting in Assam is multi-dimensional, a few of which have been discussed in this piece.

The Capacity Building Phase

Our engagement with this process started with two rounds of workshops with the Financial Advisors and Directors of select departments working on child related issues like education, health, nutrition, etc. Beyond the familiar domain of theoretical discussions, these workshops paved the way for consensus building among the departments on what constitutes an intervention for the child. Questions like ‘whether schemes for pregnant women and lactating mothers should be considered a part of the child budget for the year’ or ‘if the infrastructural development of Anganwadi Centres should be counted’ or whether the salaries of school teachers should form a part of the child budget’ were deliberated upon. Being encouraged to think about addressing the areas of concern for children in their respective sectors with new interventions, departments articulated a few proposed new schemes like water quality testing in schools, etc.

Drafting the Child Budget Guidelines for Assam

The consensus building process established in the two workshops culminated into the drafting of the Child Budget Guidelines for 2019-20 which was circulated within different departments as a manual for reporting in the Child Budget Statement (CBS). The template proposed for this year’s statement was significantly different from the existing format, being segregated into two distinct parts - Part A and Part B. While the former accounted for all government interventions which are exclusively targeted towards children, Part B is meant to capture the schemes and programmes which may be partly meant for children. For the latter group, it then made sense to report only the child specific components within the entire scheme as a relevant entry.

Preparing the Child Budget Statement

CBGA actively collaborated with the Finance Department of Assam in preparing the CBS for 2019-20. The process was a long drawn one with repeated deliberations with the line departments to understand their logic of reporting and thereafter initiate dialogue with them. With the introduction of the new template, the process of reporting in the Child Budget Statement was far from being a smooth one. While the segregation into the different parts of the statement was the lesser of the hurdles for the departments, figuring out the child specific allocations for Part B proved to be a major challenge for them. The gaps in the available data on child beneficiaries, thus, crucially constrained the quality of reporting in the statement. Discussions with the departments yielded interesting insights into the overlapping nature of budgeting for different segments of the population where several schemes like scholarships and entitlements to girl students formed part of both the Gender Budget and the Child Budget Statements.

What can we take away from this experience?

Needless to say, the process of child budgeting is still evolving, not only in Assam, but in different states as well. From our close association with the Assam experience, it can be said that on the one hand, there is a sustained need for sensitising the departments towards responsive budgeting for vulnerable sections of the population. On the other hand, considerable efforts are also needed to address the data gaps and strengthen the institutional mechanisms towards this end.

An important learning from this engagement has been the fact that the guiding principles used for reporting in the CBS are themselves not water-tight and have to be necessarily looked upon as evolving with the changing nature of the government programmes. An example in reference is the issue of incidental benefits accruing to children. While it is widely accepted that ‘incidental benefits’ from different government interventions flowing to children should ideally not be a part of a statement dedicated to ‘direct’ policy-driven benefits for children, often it becomes a challenge to determine what can be termed as ‘incidental’. This is especially the case in large government programmes where it often becomes difficult to ascertain the proportion of resources allocated exclusively for children. In spite of this caveat, it can hardly be overlooked that the proper implementation of these schemes is instrumental in shaping a child’s overall development. Clearly, such conundrums call for further deliberation on these issues to build a better understanding of what does a child responsive planning process entail as well as for ensuring a more robust categorisation of child related allocations.

Thus, the need for incorporating a child lens in both the planning and budgeting phases cannot be emphasised enough. It is only through such concerted efforts that a state like Assam can ensure better outcomes for children in the coming years.

 

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and don’t necessarily reflect the position of CBGA. You can reach Simonti Chakraborty at simonti@cbgaindia.org.