Budget for `Aam Aadmi’ leaves children outUnion Budget 2009-10, the first budget of the second United Progressive Alliance government that’s still basking in the glory of a resounding election victory, gets a thumbs-down from India’s children for two reasons.

First, it hardly has any new scheme for children, except some reorganization in education, nor is there more money. Second, it has managed to place a fresh debt burden of Rs 3500-and rising-on the head of every Indian, including 450 million persons less than 18 years’ old. According to calculations made by HAQ: Centre for Child Rights, which has been analysing central and state budgets from a child rights perspective for ten years, the Budget for Children for the current fiscal is only Rs 43104.16 crore. In other words, the amount of money allocated to various children’s programmes is only 4.21 per cent of the record Rs 10.20 lakh crore of total expenditure budgeted for 2009-10. This is the lowest share accorded to children in the last four yearsas table 1 shows, the BfC share was .85 per cent in 2005-06. This is much less than the 5.31 per cent share for children budgeted for 2008-09 as well as the reduced share of 4.31 per cent in therevised estimates of that year.

In fact, the BfC share comes to even less — 3.88 per cent-if we take into ccount Statement 22 of the Expenditure Budget 2009-10 document, defined as Budget Provisionsfor Schemes for the Welfare of Children, prepared by the finance ministry. This `children’s budget statement’ was initiated by former finance minister P Chidambaram last fiscal, and this year’s statement shows a few glaring omissions of schemes probably due to departmental tardiness and is therefore smaller than HAQ estimate.