Budget India 2020: During her speech for Union Budget 2020-21, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao programme has yielded positive results. She said that due to the continuous efforts of the government, the Gross Enrolment Ratio or girls across all levels of education is now higher than that for girls. Another one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship programme, Beti Bachao Beti Padhao was launched with the aim of sensitising citizens towards girls children and encouraging them to send girls to schools.
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With this, Sitharaman announced a budgetary allocation of Rs 28,600 crore for programmes which are specific to women.
Launched in 2015, the scheme focused on the menace of female foeticide, especially in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, Uttarakhand and Bihar. To tackle the menace which came to fore in the 1991 and 2001 census of India, the scheme had a three-point strategy. It focused to implement a sustained communication campaign in order to mobilize the society towards accepting that the value of the girl child is equal to that of a boy child and towards promoting education of girls in society. The second focus of the scheme was placing the problem of declining sex ratio at birth among the public and encouraging public discussions to raise awareness. The third strategy was to zero-down on critical districts and areas and focusing on promoting the scheme in these regions.
The announcement by Sitharaman in the Budget scheme comes soon after the data released by Haryana government revealed that the state, which was one of the most critical states in terms of sex ratio at birth due to rampant female foeticide, is now on the path to recovery. At the end of 2019, the sex ratio at birth in Haryana increased 52 points since 2014 from 871 girls against 1,000 boys in 2014 to 923 girls for every 1,000 boys at the end of 2019.
The Union Budget is the annual statement detailing the planned expenditure and revenue of the Government of India for a particular financial year and it often includes the announcement of several schemes and changes in tax policies. It is announced on the first day of February and is followed by a discussion in the Lok Sabha for subsequent approval.