This article looks at the performance of the Women Component Plan (WCP) introduced at the local level in Kerala to encourage participatory planning by studying the experience of five village panchayats over a 10 year reference period. There has been a marked difference among projects carried out under the WCP and general sector projects and projects meant for Scheduled Castes in expenditure efficiency. The article also looks at the nature of projects implemented, the extent of participation of women members in their design and execution, and the opinion of elected representatives on the usefulness of the WCP.

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This article discusses gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) at the local level in Kerala by studying a village panchayat, the lowest tier of rural local government. GRB of a rudimentary form, known as Women Component Plan (WCP), had been in existence at the local level for the last 20 years as a key feature of participatory planning. The study adopts a fourfold classification of all projects implemented in the panchayat on the basis of their gender friendliness and calculates allocation and expenditure under each of these categories. The data on which the article relies relate to the expenditure incurred under the annual plans rather than budgets, which are based on inflated and unreliable data. The article ends by making some observations based on the data and the overall experience of Kerala in gender budgeting.

John S. Moolakkattu and Jos Chathukulam (Eds.), Challenges to Local Governance in the Pandemic Era: Perspectives from South Asia and Beyond. UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022, 365 pages. £75.99, ISBN 978-1-5275-8174-6 (Hardback).

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