‘The goal is not sentiment. It is clarity’: Economist Lekha S. Chakraborty on gender budgeting | INTERVIEW

For economist Lekha S. Chakraborty, gender budgeting is not only a subject of research but also rooted in her childhood. Her father, an ISRO engineer, left the family when she was three, leaving her mother, a nurse, to raise two children while continuing to work. That experience shaped Chakraborty’s understanding of how care, mobility, access to resources and public policy affect women’s lives.

In her essay, Gender Budgeting: That Fire in My Belly, published in the Routledge anthology of economists, Chakraborty traces her journey from a difficult childhood to her work on one of India’s early gender-budgeting initiatives. She describes the resistance she faced when she began the work in 2000, when the idea was still unfamiliar to mainstream public finance. Her research sought to demonstrate that budgets are not gender-neutral and that fiscal choices can influence human development and economic opportunity.

The essay is both a personal account and an account of how an emerging field of research became part of public policy. As economist Lant Pritchett writes in his appreciation of the essay, it is a “deeply moving personal account” of how life experiences can shape research and policy so that “a new flow of ideas and practice can make for better economics and better policy.”

That connection between lived experience and economic analysis also drew appreciation from Janet Yellen, former US Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve Chair, who reviewed Chakraborty’s chapter in Women in Public Finance.

Chakraborty is a professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), New Delhi, and a Research Faculty Associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, New York. Her work focuses on public finance, macroeconomics and gender budgeting.

In this conversation, Chakraborty reflects on the experiences that shaped her work, the resistance to gender budgeting, its evolution in India and the changes she believes are still needed in public finance.

Q: Your story has been published in Women in Public Finance, alongside those of 21 other women. Why did you feel the need to tell your personal story?

Chakraborty: Public finance is usually discussed in the language of numbers and models. Yet those numbers shape real lives. I was born as a daughter of an ISRO space engineer, but lived differently—abandoned. My early years—raised by a single mother after my father left when I was three—showed me how the absence of basic support systems can constrain a family’s economic future. Those constraints are not strictly private misfortunes.

I shared the story because personal experience can make abstract fiscal choices concrete. When researchers see how budgets either reinforce or reduce inequality, the conversation becomes harder to dismiss.

The goal is not sentiment. It is clarity.

Gender budgeting exists to correct measurable gaps that affect growth, productivity, and fairness. When Manal and Maja approached me for this book chapter, I first wrote it in the language of an economist. They urged me—we want your story.

Q: You have said that your mother’s experience shaped your understanding of gender inequality. How did it influence your work as an economist?

Chakraborty: It gave me an early sense of how constraints compound. Later, I examined how public spending, tax policy, and fiscal rules interact with unpaid care and gender gaps in health, education and labour force participation. The personal background did not replace empirical evidence; it sharpened the questions I asked of the evidence. It made clear that treating the care economy as an afterthought is not only inequitable; it is economically inefficient.

Q: When you started working on gender budgeting in 2000, many economists were sceptical. What was difficult for them to accept about the idea?

Chakraborty: The dominant view held that budgets should be neutral tools for managing fiscal deficits, economic growth, and macroeconomic stability. Introducing an explicit focus on gender struck some colleagues as outside the core mandate of public finance. Terms such as the “care economy” were seen as elitist vocabulary rather than macroeconomic concerns.

What was hard to accept was the evidence that silence itself is a choice. Budgets that ignore differences in unpaid care work, access to services, and lifetime opportunities do not stay neutral; they reproduce existing imbalances. Over time, empirical work showing that gender aware public spending can improve human development outcomes helped shift the discussion. The resistance was real, but the empirics eventually made the case to go “beyond the GDP” to get human development outcomes.

Q: Why is a government budget not really gender-neutral? How can budget decisions affect men and women differently?

Chakraborty: A budget is a political statement of priorities written in numbers. When it overlooks the fact that women perform the majority of unpaid care work, or that girls still face disadvantages in nutrition, education, and health, those omissions have severe consequences.

Spending on roads or industrial infrastructure may expand opportunities, while underinvestment in childcare, maternal health, or girls’ schooling limits women’s ability to participate fully in the labour market. Tax incidence analysis shows that tax measures can fall more heavily on low-income households. When governments tighten budgets to meet fiscal deficit targets, social infrastructure that supports care and human capital formation is often the first to shrink. These patterns are measurable. Gender budgeting simply makes them visible so that policy can respond.

Q: India introduced gender budgeting more than two decades ago. How well has it worked, and what still needs to change?

Chakraborty: India formally institutionalised gender budgeting in the mid-2000s. Gender budget statements now appear regularly, and the approach has spread to many state governments. Transparency around spending intended to benefit women has improved.

Yet implementation remains incomplete. Gender considerations are still limited in the tax transfer formulas that distribute resources between the central government and the states. Data systems that would allow precise public expenditure tracking of who actually benefits from public spending are uneven. The large volume of unpaid care work continues to sit outside core macroeconomic models.

The next steps are practical—stronger requirements to assess the gender impact of major fiscal decisions, better data, and clearer links between budget statements and actual results. Formal institutionalisation of gender budgeting within the Ministry of Finance makes the process sustainable.

Q: You have worked on gender budgeting in several countries and at different levels of government. What have you learnt from these experiences?

Chakraborty: The most important lesson is that context matters. A single template rarely works everywhere. In countries with stronger local governments, decisions made closer to citizens often respond more effectively to the needs of women and families (which economists refer to as the “principle of subsidiarity”). Where women hold more seats in local bodies, spending tends to have incorporated the revealed preferences of women.

Work in places as different as Sri Lanka, South Africa, Mexico, and parts of North Africa and the European Union also showed that gender gaps frequently intersect with other forms of inequality. Effective analysis has to account for those overlapping disadvantages. The common finding is straightforward – when fiscal systems are designed to see differences in how men and women experience public policy, the results are both fairer and more efficient.

Q: Janet Yellen has praised the way you turned a personal experience into rigorous economic research. How did you make that transition from personal experience to evidence and policy?

Chakraborty: Yes. It was humbling when Janet Yellen, former US Treasury Secretary and former Chair of the Federal Reserve, sent me an appreciative review of my book chapter in Women in Public Finance edited by Maja and Manal.

Economics indeed provides a disciplined way to move from observation to measurement. Analysis such as the opportunity cost of unpaid care time, the distribution of public benefits across households, and the long-term returns to investing in health and education allowed me to place individual hardship inside a larger macroeconomic framework.

As I said, the economic models did not erase the difficulties of those early years. They did, however, turn them into questions that could be tested and into policy recommendations that institutions could act upon. That is the practical value of the discipline—it converts lived constraints into empirical evidence that can change policy.

And integrating a gender lens in monetary macro policy has not yet happened, though “greening of monetary policy” is trending, against the backdrop of climate change commitments.

Q: After more than two decades of working on gender budgeting, what is the one change you would most like to see in public finance?

Chakraborty: I would like governments to treat the care economy as essential infrastructure. The hours spent raising children, caring for the elderly, and maintaining households are not a private residual. They are the foundation on which paid work and economic growth rest.

That recognition should also appear in systems of national accounts, in the rules that govern budget deficits, and in the tax transfer formulas that share resources across levels of government. When public finance systematically accounts for unpaid care and protects the investments that support it, both equity and efficiency improve. That is the institutional shift still required and the one that would matter most for the next generation, in the context of demographic transition.

And indeed, I am looking forward to the champion RBI governor who will integrate a gender lens into monetary policy.