Child Budgeting

Child budgeting is a public-finance technique that disaggregates a government's budget to isolate, quantify, and report the resources directed toward children, defined in the Indian context as persons below 18 years under Section 2(12) of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015. Its conceptual basis lies in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which India ratified on 11 December 1992; CRC Article 4 obligates States Parties to undertake measures for the implementation of children's economic, social, and cultural rights "to the maximum extent of their available resources." The Committee on the Rights of the Child operationalised this through General Comment No. 19 (2016) on public budgeting for the realisation of children's rights, which directs governments to make children visible in budget documents. In India the practice was institutionalised by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, which introduced a dedicated child budget statement in the Union Budget beginning 2008–09, paralleling the gender budget statement launched in 2005–06.

The mechanics begin with a definitional exercise: scheme-by-scheme, ministries identify programmes whose benefits flow wholly or partly to children. Each line item is then classified by the share of expenditure attributable to children—100 per cent for schemes exclusively serving children, such as the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) under the Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0 umbrella, and a notional percentage for composite schemes where children are one of several beneficiary groups. These tagged allocations are aggregated and presented as a statement appended to the Expenditure Budget. From Budget 2024–25 the consolidated figures appear in Statement 12 of the Expenditure Profile, which sets out the "Allocation for Welfare of Children." The exercise is repeated annually, allowing year-on-year comparison of both budget estimates and revised estimates against actual expenditure.

A further analytical layer organises child allocations into thematic sectors—commonly child development, child education, child health, and child protection. Child protection, covering schemes such as Mission Vatsalya, has historically commanded the smallest share, often well below one per cent of the total child budget, a structural imbalance repeatedly flagged by civil-society analysts. State governments replicate the method in their own budgets: Maharashtra, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka have produced child budget statements, frequently with technical support from UNICEF and HAQ: Centre for Child Rights. The instrument can be expanded into outcome budgeting, linking allocations to measurable indicators such as immunisation coverage, school retention, or the under-five mortality rate, thereby moving beyond input accounting toward results.

Contemporary practice is anchored in the Union Budget cycle managed by the Department of Economic Affairs and the Department of Expenditure under the Ministry of Finance, with the Ministry of Women and Child Development as nodal coordinator. The 2024–25 child budget tagged allocations across more than a dozen ministries, with the bulk concentrated in the Department of School Education and Literacy through Samagra Shiksha and the PM POSHAN mid-day meal scheme, and in the Ministry of Women and Child Development through Poshan 2.0, Mission Vatsalya, and Mission Shakti. The share of the child budget within the total Union Budget has hovered in the range of roughly two to three per cent, a proportion that NITI Aayog and child-rights organisations consider low relative to the fact that children constitute close to forty per cent of India's population.

Child budgeting must be distinguished from gender budgeting, with which it is procedurally twinned but conceptually separate: gender budgeting tracks allocations advancing women's empowerment and gender equality, whereas child budgeting tracks allocations for those under 18, and a single scheme such as ICDS may appear in both statements. It also differs from outcome budgeting, which measures performance against deliverables for all sectors, and from zero-based budgeting, which rebuilds every allocation from scratch each year. Child budgeting is a reporting and accountability lens overlaid on existing allocations; it does not itself create a separate fund or guarantee additional money, a limitation that practitioners must keep in view when assessing its impact.

The principal controversy concerns the gap between tagging and delivery. Because composite schemes are assigned notional child-attribution percentages, the headline figure can overstate genuinely child-specific spending, and methodological changes between years complicate trend analysis. Underspending is a recurrent problem: revised estimates and actuals frequently fall short of budget estimates, particularly in child protection. The 2021 rationalisation of centrally sponsored schemes—folding earlier programmes into Saksham Anganwadi, Mission Vatsalya, and Mission Shakti—disrupted continuity in the child budget series. Critics, including the Comptroller and Auditor General in various audit reports, have noted weak convergence between line ministries and inconsistent state-level reporting, undermining the instrument's promise of accountability.

For the working practitioner—whether a desk officer in a social-sector ministry, a UPSC aspirant addressing General Studies Paper II on welfare schemes and governance, or a policy researcher—child budgeting offers a concrete diagnostic tool for evaluating a state's commitment to its CRC obligations and to constitutional directives such as Article 39(f) and Article 45. It enables comparison across years, states, and sectors, exposes neglected domains like child protection, and connects fiscal data to rights-based outcomes. Mastery of the instrument requires understanding both its analytical strength as a transparency mechanism and its limitation as a tagging exercise that neither commands new resources nor by itself ensures that allocated funds reach children.