Budget 2026 expectation through gender lens: Women’s time, work and care should shape spending priorities

Women contribute only around 18% to India’s GDP, not because they work less, but because much of their labour remains unpaid and invisible.

• Gender budget rose 37.5% in 2025-26, now 8.9% of total Union Budget allocations
• Experts urge Budget 2026-27 to focus on saving women's time, not just spending
• Calls to redesign welfare, employment, and entrepreneurship schemes for women

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As the Union Budget for 2026-27 is unveiled amid economic uncertainty and growing social-sector demands, women and children remain central to expectations from fiscal policy.

The sharp rise in gender-responsive allocations over the past year has raised hopes that the coming Budget will continue to prioritise nutrition, education, health and protection, while also confronting a deeper structural challenge: women’s time poverty and its impact on economic participation, as argued by Tanu M Goyal, a Senior Fellow at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations and Sharavni Prakash and Anjhana Ramesh, researchers with ICRIER’s EPWD in an article by The Hindu.

In 2025-26, the Gender Budget rose by 37.5%, touching Rs 4.49 lakh crore and accounting for about 8.9% of total Union Budget allocations, or roughly 1% of GDP. The Ministry of Women and Child Development alone contributed over 81% of its total outlay to women-centric programmes, and a record 49 ministries and departments, along with five Union Territories, reported allocations under the Gender Budget Statement.

Yet experts argue that higher spending alone is not enough; what matters is whether this spending genuinely frees women’s time, strengthens productivity, and expands choice.

Women’s time poverty and the growth puzzle

Women contribute only around 18% to India’s GDP, not because they work less, but because much of their labour remains unpaid and invisible. About 40% of women are in the labour force, largely in unpaid agricultural work, while 60% of those outside the labour force cite domestic and care responsibilities as the main reason.

Data from the Time Use Survey (2025) highlights the strain: the time women spend on unpaid care and domestic work rose marginally from 364 minutes per day in 2019 to 366 minutes in 2024. At the same time, time spent on paid work increased from 68 to 76 minutes. The implication is clear -- women’s total working hours have increased, but without a commensurate rise in income or agency.

Reimagining welfare schemes as time-saving enablers

A key expectation from Budget 2026-27 is that welfare programmes dominating the gender budget will be redesigned using time-use metrics. For example, housing schemes are often classified as women-empowering because houses are registered in women’s names.

But without piped water, functional toilets, electricity, and clean cooking fuel, housing remains a static asset rather than a time-saving one.

Experts argue that the idea of counting a “gender-complete house” as the unit of budgeting and reporting could transform outcomes.

Automatic convergence of housing with drinking water, sanitation, rooftop solar and clean cooking initiatives would directly reduce the hours women spend on basic household tasks, they say.

Similarly, childcare and nutrition services remain fragmented. Palna creches, Anganwadis, and POSHAN programmes frequently operate in silos, sometimes duplicating infrastructure while leaving coverage gaps.

According to them, pooling these allocations under a “Care Infrastructure Convergence Window” and measuring success in terms of women’s time saved and hours of care redistributed -- not just centres opened or meals served -- could create a more coherent care ecosystem.

Linking allocations to gender-specific outcomes

Although more than three-fourths of gender budget allocations fall under schemes with 30–99% or below 30% women-specific components, many of these are essentially re-labelled portions of existing programmes.

Ministries are rarely required to redesign schemes around women’s specific constraints before claiming gender-responsive funding, they point out.

Agriculture illustrates this gap. Despite employing the largest share of women workers, often as unpaid family labour, the sector receives only about 4.2% of gender budget flows.

A substantial portion goes to income support for landholders, who are predominantly male, and does little to move women out of unpaid work, it is argued.

The expectation is that Budget 2026-27 will push ministries to demonstrate how allocations directly address women’s barriers -- whether in access to assets, skills, mobility, or markets -- before they are counted as part of the gender budget.

Generating demand for women’s labour

Gender budgeting must also be embedded in employment strategies. The Employment-Linked Incentive scheme, aimed at creating more than 3.5 crore jobs over two years, is seen as an opportunity to set explicit targets for women.

An ambitious benchmark of at least 50% of new jobs for women, supported by additional wage subsidies and higher social-security contributions for employers hiring women, could shift the demand side of the labour market.

In rural areas, the expanded employment guarantee programme -- now proposing to raise assured work from 100 to 125 days -- remains crucial. Women already make up over 50% of beneficiaries, and maintaining nearly half of the programme’s allocation within the gender budget would help address both income insecurity and care constraints, especially if childcare and work-near-home provisions are strengthened.

Supporting women entrepreneurs to scale

Women own nearly 60% of India’s unincorporated manufacturing enterprises, but only about 4% of these are registered, and most operate at very small scale. Despite this, MSME allocations for women account for just 0.9% of the budget.

While 64% of loan accounts under micro-credit schemes belong to women and 42% of disbursements go to them, the majority are tiny “Shishu” loans below ₹50,000, insufficient for expansion. Budget expectations include larger ticket financing, along with digital, financial and technological enablement, skilling beyond traditional sectors, and public investment in safety, mobility and childcare to make entrepreneurship viable.

Preparing women for a digital and AI-driven future

The Rs 660 crore gender allocation under the India AI Mission in 2025 -- about 33% of the programme’s total outlay -- signalled intent to include women in the technology transition. For Budget 2026-27, the ask is deeper investment in women-focused digital skilling, AI-enabled mentorship, and gender-sensitive algorithm design, with time-based metrics to ensure that technology replaces drudgery rather than adding to women’s workload.

From spending in women’s name to real empowerment

Ultimately, the success of the 2026-27 gender budget will not be judged by how much is allocated in women’s name, but by whether those resources translate into time saved, income earned and choices expanded. A budget that places women’s time at the centre of policy design can turn the narrative of “Nari Shakti” into tangible gains in agency, productivity and inclusive growth.