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Summary
Despite a ₹5 trillion gender budget, India’s push for women’s inclusion faces a severe data and information gap, where it is not clear if women beneficiaries are gaining business ownership.
A decade has passed since India began rebuilding inclusive and progressive infrastructure for women, with the gender budget hitting ₹5 trillion in 2026-27. This represents around 9% of the Centre’s total expenditure.
While the push for women’s inclusion through higher expenditure is visible, and millions of women are part of several schemes encompassing self-help groups, small businesses, and employment, among others, several gaps remain that raise questions about whether these benefits are just on paper.
Data shows that over 50 million women beneficiaries are under the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY), and over 100 million under self-help groups, but very few are registered businesses—the share of formally registered enterprises run by women was just 20.5% in 2023-24, marginally up from 17.5% in 2021-22.
The shifting focus
While the gender budget has grown in size, the internal architecture suggests a shifting focus towards livelihood rather than women-led industrialization. Take the two main schemes, for example: Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) for women. Their share in the overall gender budget nearly tripled to 8.8% in 2022-23, compared to 2015-16. However, in recent years, it has tapered and declined to just 4.5% in 2026-27.
The decline in share was due to a higher allocation to schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY). This creates a credit-ownership gap where the system is exceptionally efficient at putting small amounts of money into the hands of many women, yet struggles to foster an environment where those women can transition into the formal economy as registered enterprise owners.
Ladder limits
The most evidence of the bottleneck in creating women entrepreneurs is found in the Mudra Yojana loan ladder, designed to facilitate the transition of borrowers from the ‘Shishu’ tier (up to ₹50,000) to the ‘Tarun’ tier (up to ₹10 lakh). The current data highlights a severe gap in women’s participation at the higher level, with their share dropping 26 percentage points between the bottom and the top tier. While women dominate the entry-level Shishu category (68%), they comprise only 42% of Tarun borrowers. This suggests that for the vast majority of women, these loans act as a safety net for household consumption or micro-scale activities rather than growth capital for scaling a competitive business. The obstacle is also technical since moving to the Tarun level requires current accounts, audited balance sheets, and formal documentation that the informal, home-based entrepreneur, such as a village-level food processor, cannot easily maintain.
While the share of women registered with MSMEs has gone up, albeit marginally, the participation rate under Mudra has declined from 71% in 2021-22 to 64% in 2023-24, highlighting a critical unexplained gap in why ownership and credit counts are moving independently of each other.
Data and monitoring gaps
There are severe gaps in inter-ministerial data integration, with different schemes having a distinct definition of beneficiaries. Since there is no unified digital identity to track a woman’s economic trajectory, it is unclear whether the 9 million women recently added under the Pradhan Mantri Formalisation of Micro Food Processing Enterprises (PMFME) are new entrepreneurs or simply the same women captured through SHGs or the employment-guarantee scheme. This data fragmentation may lead to double-counting, inflating success stories on paper while masking reality.
A significant lack of transparent, gender-disaggregated data is also obscuring the true impact of India’s gender budget on female entrepreneurship, leaving critical gaps in how we monitor business survival, market linkages, and the transition from informal to formal enterprises. While the government successfully tracks high-level metrics such as Jan Dhan accounts and employment figures, it fails to provide granular data on whether beneficiaries are actually progressing up the Mudra credit ladder or if PMFME grants are sustaining long-term businesses rather than just temporary projects.
Without specific tracking of Udyam graduation and supply chain integration, it remains unclear if women are building self-sustaining companies or merely accessing one-time subsidies before returning to the informal sector. The current system prioritizes the disbursement of funds, but there is very little information available to measure the actual success and longevity of enterprises that these funds are meant to create. The rising number of women beneficiaries under several schemes, coupled with rising gender budgeting, is an achievement. However, several more steps are needed, such as determining how many women-led businesses survive for long after loans are disbursed to women.
The author is a public policy researcher and an independent writer.
English (US) ·