Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) across India have joined hands to prepare a document — Policy Asks (Charter of demands) — urging the India’s federal government to take into account some of the major concerns across a range of sectors that have a direct bearing on the lives of underprivileged sections — such as women, children, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and people with disabilities — while shaping the country’s fiscal policy over the coming years.

The Policy Asks have been compiled by CSOs taking into account both substantive work toward assessing budgets (at the national and sub-national level) from the perspective of the vulnerable sections and the inputs from a large number of CSOs that have been working on development issues at the grassroots level.

“We hope the federal Ministry of Finance and the other ministries would consider some of these expectations in shaping their budgetary policy priorities this year as well as in the coming years,” the CSOs said at the end of the two-day national convention on Union Budget 2015-16.

The convention discussed in detail important processes relating to government budgets in India, which have been constrained by some of the widely-acknowledged challenges in governance in the country.

These challenges pertain to lack of adequate transparency in governance, limited space for public participation in processes of priority setting, and weak mechanisms of accountability of government staff.

The civil society budget groups from across the country, collectively as a network called People’s Budget Initiative (PBI), under the aegis of Center for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), deliberated the issues pertaining to the union budget wherein top economists, social activists, journalists etc. participated as panellists in 21 sessions spread over two days to lend in the their expert advice.

The PBI in collaboration with CBGA had submitted earlier to the Union Ministry of Finance a number of Policy Asks and expectations across a range of sectors.

After this two-day convention, a revised abridged version of Policy Asks highlighting the most important points would be re-submitted to the Union Ministry of Finance for consideration to be included in the Union Budget 2015-16.

The convention also discussed that the fiscal policy strategies for social inclusion such as Scheduled Caste Sub Plan (SCSP), Tribal Sub Plan (TSP), Prime Minister’s 15 Point Program for Minorities and Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB), have not influenced planning or budgeting in a significant way. Instead, most of these strategies have influenced mainly the reporting of some of the allocations and expenditures in the budget documents.

In order to address this major gap, the organizers claimed, there is a need to promote redesigning of the fiscal policy strategies for vulnerable sections so as to ensure that — the processes of planning and budgeting incorporate special or additional measures to address specific needs and challenges confronting the different vulnerable sections (such as, women, children, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and persons with disabilities); adequate budgetary resources are provided for such special or additional measures; and only such relevant allocations (focusing on the specific vulnerable sections) are reported under SCSP, TSP and GRB etc.

Subrat Das, executive director of CBGA, earlier threw light on the aims and objects of the convention.

The opening session titled “Budgetary Policies, Institutions and Processes: Continuity and Change” was chaired by Vinod Vyasulu (Center for Budget and Policy Studies, Karnataka).

The panellists were Abhijit Sen (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi) and Anuradha Balaram(Kerala State Planning Board).

This was followed by breakout sessions on ‘Expectations from the Union Budget 2015-16’ wherein there were five parallel sessions with three at a time encompassing 15 topics on the first day.

These sessions were: education; drinking water and sanitation; climate change; health; agriculture and food security; urban poor; rural development; Muslims; people with disabilities; Adivasis; Dalits; unorganized Workers; children; women and budget transparency.

On the second day, five sessions were held.

Apart from the plenary session, which saw reporting from the breakout sessions on the previous day, the other session was held on ‘What’s Working Well in Public Provisioning, Where and Why?’; ‘Taxation Policies: Who funds our government?’ and ‘Black Money: Looking beyond the obvious’.

The last session of the day was on ‘Translating the Asks into Action: Open Discussion’, which was moderated by Amitabh Behar (National Foundation for India, Delhi).

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