Dhaval Desai, “Gender-Responsive Budgeting: Towards the Promise of Inclusive Cities,” ORF Occasional Paper No. 552, Observer Research Foundation, June 2026. Cities are India’s engines of economic growth, yet these spaces remain deeply exclusionary for women and girls.[1] The National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) Crime in India 2023 report shows a steady rise in crimes against women in metropolitan cities—from 43,414 in 2021 to 48,755 in 2022 and further to 51,393 in 2023—an 18-percent increase over two years. Gender-responsive urban planning is largely absent, and the result is that structural and social inequalities are reproduced and intensified.[2] Why have Indian cities not become safer or more empowering for women despite decades of urban reforms and constitutional decentralisation? Part of the answer lies in the lack of gender-responsive budgeting based on practical gender needs in urban governance. India’s 2001 National Policy for the Empowerment of Women provided an institutional basis for gender budgeting, emphasising that ministry-level action plans incorporate “gender perspective” in budgeting.[3] Although gender budgeting became a national mandate with the introduction of the Gender Budget Statement in 2005,[4] it has yet to gain prominence in many urban local bodies (ULBs),[5] the tier of governance closest to citizens. In prioritising capital-intensive physical infrastructure and technologically enabled “smartness”, cities allocate fragmented and inconsistent resources to essential social infrastructure. In the absence of gender-sensitive budgeting, public expenditure fails to address the specific needs of women and gender minorities and does not translate constitutional commitments into inclusive outcomes. Consequently, opportunities, mobility, and agency remain shaped by public spending priorities which, without gender-sensitive budgeting, fail to translate constitutional commitments into concrete fiscal action.[6],[7] As a result, cities overlook the specific needs and lived experiences of women and the transgender population in urban areas. India’s Ministry of Women and Child Development’s Mission Shakti defines gender budgeting