Budget 2021

What's Your Money Spent On?

Water-stressed India needs sustainable water practices. In 5 years to 2020-2021, the water ministry got 1.1% of the total Union Budget every year, the bulk of which was spent on provision of drinking water & sanitation. Groundwater, which meets most of India’s water needs, got a smaller share. More investment is needed to protect water resources, such as by groundwater recharge
Read our explainer 'Promise Of Tap Water To All Rural Homes Will Need More Funds'
Decades of underspending on public school education has resulted in poor learning outcomes. While spending on education has increased in absolute terms, its proportion to the total government budget has remained stagnant at 10.5% with an increase from only 2.8% of GDP in 2014-15 to 3.1% in 2019-20
Read our explainer 'How India Funds Public School Education'
States and Union Territories together spend almost thrice the amount that the Centre allocates to healthcare. In the 2020-21 Union Budget, the defence ministry received the highest allocation while the health ministry was at the ninth place. For years now, experts have flagged the need for bigger investment in healthcare, which the Covid-19 pandemic made starkly clear
Read our budget explainer 'Healthcare After The Pandemic'
For the past 13 years, India’s ‘gender budget’ has been nearly constant. Within it, at least two-thirds is allocated to schemes that only partially benefit women. While the Rural Housing Scheme was started to encourage women’s house ownership, experts say the lack of monitoring leaves no scope to confirm if women are truly benefitting from the scheme
Read our explainer 'What India's Gender Budgets Have Achieved'
In this report, we are analysing the central government's gender budgets that feature schemes funded by the central government