FM Nirmal Sitharaman Highlights Plethora of Initiatives for Women in her Fourth Budget Session

By: WE Staff | Tuesday, 1 February 2022

In her fourth budget speech on Tuesday, Union Finance Minister Nirmal Sitharaman announced plenty of initiatives for women. Today in Parliament, the FM stated, “recognising the importance of 'Nari Shakti’. 3 schemes were launched to provide integrated development for women and children.” Mission Poshan 2.0, Mission Vatsalya, and Mission Shakti, she said, were recently launched to provide children with integrated benefits. Saksham Anganwadi is a new generation Anganwadi with improved infrastructure and audiovisual aids, as well as improved environments for early childhood development. Under the scheme, two lakh anganwadis will be upgraded, according to FM Sitharaman.

Women and children make up 67.7% of India's population, according to the Ministry of Women and Child Development's 2011 census.

FM Sitharaman set aside $20,105 crore for Saksham Anganwadi and POSHAN 2.0, 900 crore for Mission Vatsalya, and $3,109 crore for Mission Shakti last year (Mission for Protection and Empowerment for Women).

On the education front, the finance minister proposed establishing a digital university that would provide education using a hub-and-spoke model.

She also stated that the 1-Class-1-TV channel would be implemented to provide children with supplemental education in order to compensate for the loss of formal education caused by the COVID pandemic.

Small and medium-sized businesses, according to FM Sitharaman, have yet to recover from the recession. As Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman began her Budget speech on Tuesday, the equity benchmarks Sensex and Nifty extended their gains, trading over 800 points higher in mid-session deals.

The 30-share Sensex was up 842.07 points, or 1.45%, at 58,856.24, while the Nifty was up 165.50 points, or 0.95 percent, at 17,505.35. There were 27 scrips trading in the green among the 30 Sensex components. The laggards were Bharti Airtel, Dr. Reddy's Laboratories, and the State Bank of India.