KOCHI: Kerala-born economist Lekha Chakraborty is among 22 women public finance professionals from across the world featured in ‘Women in Public Finance: Stories of Gender in Budgeting’, a new global volume published by Taylor & Francis.
The book brings together first-person accounts of women working in public financial management and gender budgeting, offering rare insights into the barriers they encountered and the breakthroughs they achieved in a field long dominated by male perspectives.
Edited by Manal Fouad, a former assistant director with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Maja Bosnic, the book takes an unusual approach by moving beyond conventional technical accounts to capture the personal experiences that shaped the contributors’ professional journeys.
“I met Manal when I was leading the IMF global survey on gender budgeting from the Asia-Pacific region. Later, she told me about the book and asked me to contribute a chapter. Initially, I wrote a technical piece, but she and Maja wanted my story,” Lekha tells TNIE. Raised in Thiruvananthapuram, Lekha is now with the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) and serves on the governing boards of the International Institute of Public Finance, Munich, and the Levy Economics Institute, New York. She is internationally recognised for her work on gender budgeting and macro-fiscal policy.
For Lekha, however, gender budgeting has never been merely an academic discipline. Its roots lie in her childhood and in the struggles of her mother, a government nurse who raised two children after being abandoned by her husband.
“My mum, a nurse in government service, was abandoned by my dad when I was three years old,” she recalls.
The news of the divorce came in a simple inland letter. The family struggled to make ends meet, but her mother remained determined that her children should study.
In 1995, she won a nationwide test for a research fellowship and began doctoral studies at a national university. She married a fellow researcher in 1998, and in 2000 the couple moved to New Delhi after both were appointed to positions at a research institute under the ministry of finance.
When Lekha joined the institute in August 2000, she was assigned to lead a pioneering gender-budgeting project funded by a UN agency.
“At that time, the concept of ‘gender budgeting’ was considered by economists an oxymoron. My senior colleagues were very resistant to this new project. Despite all the good work I was leading, it affected my confidence,” she says.
But as she delved deeper into the subject, Lekha began to see gender inequality not as an abstract policy concern but as something woven into the realities she had witnessed throughout her childhood.“As I began to explore gender budgeting, I learnt that, in India, gender discrimination begins even before birth,” she says.
“Years later, when I began pioneering gender budgeting work in India, every meeting on the subject stirred deep turmoil within me, because every time a gender issue was raised, I felt they were speaking about my mother. Every issue was a personal blow that left me vulnerable within,” Lekha says.
One image that still haunts her is the way a few students from ultra-poor families ran towards the government-run van with the mid-day meals when it stopped at the assembly ground. Those experiences shaped her understanding of public finance as something far removed from numbers.