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Civic Sanskriti: Why ‘gender budget’ is key to Pune’s well-being
According to Sanskriti Menon, a budget to create women workers’ facilitation centres across the city would help their cause.
Come the New Year and we await the draft municipal budget from the civic administration.
It is usually presented around mid-January. This year, newspapers report a shortfall in revenue, resulting in a smaller kitty for new projects.
All the more reason funds should be carefully allocated, especially for those who have been worst affected.
By law, at least 5% is supposed to be a “Gender Budget”. On January 3, Savitribai Phule’s Jayanti, political and social leaders extol women’s empowerment. How should the municipal budget back these words? I asked Kiran Moghe, Poornima Chikarmane and Lakshmi Narayanan, who have for many years been strengthening livelihoods of waste-picker women and domestic workers.
Women workers, such as waste collectors, domestic workers, street vendors, and construction workers, who are in public spaces for their work, are estimated to number at least three lakh in Pune.
They provide critical services to the city, its neighbourhoods and families. Supporting them can help improve the resilience of our society as a whole.
Marginalised women need a place to register for work and welfare, build skills, hold meetings to discuss and plan their work. A budget to create such Women Workers’ Facilitation Centres across the city would help their cause.
Secondly, there is a need to ensure income support and work continuity. For example, public procurement of products like uniforms, office supplies, and mid-day meals from self-help groups of home-based workers. Continuing to contract SWaCH for doorstep waste collection provides stability of income, supports recovery of recyclables and helps create a circular sustaining economy.
Studies show that poor women are more dependent on public transport, as well as walking and cycling for work and domestic chores.
In the PMC 2021-22 budget, we would like to see allocations for street development using the Urban Street Design Guidelines, and implementation of the Pune Cycle Plan. Good street design would also make space for street vendors, an important livelihood sector in our city.
Lakh ko Pachas, a recent campaign highlighted the need for 50 buses per lakh population. By rights, Pune should have at least 3,500 buses on road by next year. PMC and PCMC must provide a large grant to PMPML for the bus-fleet size we need, to avoid dangerous air pollution, road accidents and congestion.
Working women and families also need creches and children’s centres near their homes and work places, near or at schools.
How wonderful it would be to have well-run learning and play spaces, for children to be cared for before and after school hours, even as we wait for schools to reopen. Free or highly subsidised, not dependent on uncertain earnings from informal work, this is a critical service that PMC could enable.
It’s not enough to just make budgetary allocations. Three crores were allocated for creches a couple of years ago, but never spent! We need more than noble pronouncements!
Could a city with a multi-thousand crore public budget, generating several billion dollars worth of GDP every year, provide such services and facilities? After all, behind Pune’s success as a city, partly lies the hard work of its informal sector women workers.
I also want to say what we don’t need in the civic budget - flyovers taking funds away from buses, cycle tracks and footpaths; conversion of water streams into concrete drains, increasing flash floods and destroying biodiversity.
We don’t need tunnels through hills destroying local groundwater catchment areas and making us steal water from neighbouring villages.
Let’s hope the civic budget will be spent wisely to enhance public well-being, support economic recovery, and environment conservation!
Sanskriti Menon is senior programme director, Centre for Environment Education.She writes on urban sustainability and participatory governance. Views are personal. She can be reached at civic.sanskriti@gmail.com
