India’s Space Push Has a Fiscal Blind Spot: Gender Budgeting
As space spending scales, ignoring who designs and absorbs it is no longer a neutral budget choice
Lekha Chakraborty: National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP)
Shikha Pillai: National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP)
SDG 5: Gender Equality | SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
Department of Space | Ministry of Finance
The Department of Space (DoS) is no longer a niche science outlay as mission cadence accelerates, private participation deepens, and annual allocations cross ₹13,000 crore; it is a major site of public investment risk and return. Yet the fiscal architecture governing this expansion remains largely silent on a gender lens. This persists even though women have contributed to major achievements, despite their overall underrepresentation in the space ecosystem – largely reflecting narrower participation in STEM fields.
Gender budgeting, in this context, functions as a fiscal diagnostic for equity and efficiency, testing whether public spending draws on the widest possible talent base and delivers commensurate returns. In a sector defined by high fixed costs, long-horizon R&D, and irreversible capital commitments, ignoring this lens carries real fiscal consequences. It can erode absorptive capacity and weaken the returns to large public investments.
The Illusion of Neutrality
The DoS budget for 2025–26, with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as its anchor, stands at ₹13,416 crore. How is this money actually allocated, and who benefits from it?
An ex-post benefit-incidence analysis , grounded in observed staffing and utilisation patterns, suggests that women receive roughly 19.3 per cent of the aggregate benefit of ISRO’s spending, mirroring their share in the workforce. This apparent proportionality yields a progressivity ratio of one, comparing a group’s share of budgetary benefits with its share in the workforce. Yet this apparent neutrality turns out to be an illusion once the underlying pipeline into high-impact roles is examined.
Where Neutrality Breaks Down: Programme Composition
Women constitute 19.3 per cent of ISRO’s 14,556-strong workforce, but occupy only around 12.5 per cent of technical roles, while being over-represented in administrative cadres. These technical roles are concentrated in the most STEM- and field-intensive segments of the programme, particularly Space Technology – covering human spaceflight, launch vehicles, propulsion systems, and reusable platforms that form the backbone of India’s push for orbital self-reliance. This segment alone accounts for 76.25 per cent of the DoS budget (₹10,230 crore).
Once women’s low presence in these STEM- and field-intensive roles is factored in, the effective progressivity ratio for this head falls to around 0.65, indicating that women receive a smaller share of effective budgetary benefit than their representation in decision-making roles within advanced R&D-intensive Space Technology programmes would suggest.
By contrast, Space Applications – covering Earth observation, navigation, and disaster management – looks mildly progressive when we focus on who actually uses and benefits from these services. But at just about 12.7 per cent of the total budget (₹1,706 crore), this segment is too small to meaningfully counterbalance the more regressive spending concentrated in the much larger Space Technology outlay. Even here, however, women are underrepresented in design, technical decision-making, and leadership roles.
Utilisation, Efficiency, and Who Gets to Spend
Distributional incidence alone does not determine fiscal performance; how effectively funds are absorbed and executed forms a second diagnostic lens. Utilisation varies sharply across programme segments, indicating that execution problems are not uniform across the system. Utilisation rates range from around 10.9 percent at IN-SPACe – the regulatory and facilitation body for private space participation – to about 32 percent at mature satellite R&D centres, where missions and workflows are more established. The bulk of under-utilisation sits in Space Technology programmes, where projects are more complex and take longer to design and execute.
Public spending in space does not automatically result in outputs. Fund utilisation depends on who leads projects, who holds technical authority, and who decides the order and pace of design and execution. Notably, the programme segments with the most persistent utilisation challenges are also those where women are least represented in technical and decision-making roles, a pattern that gender budgeting highlights as a signal of deeper execution-capacity constraints.
The implication is important. Improving utilisation in the space programme is about attention to the institutional channels through which spending power is exercised – an aspect that headline budget aggregates tend to obscure but that becomes increasingly relevant as allocations grow.
The Institutional Hook
India already possesses a mature gender-budgeting framework. The Union Gender Budget Statement for 2025–26 amounts to ₹4.49 lakh crore – 8.86 percent of total Union expenditure – covering 39 ministries and departments. Yet the DoS does not feature in this architecture, despite its rapidly growing budget and its enabling role across areas such as climate monitoring, agricultural decision support, and digital public infrastructure.
Addressing this gap does not require new legislation or parallel reporting systems. It requires reclassification and tagging of existing expenditure heads, along with the inclusion of gender-disaggregated indicators in outcome budgets that the Department already prepares – for example, indicators linked to staffing composition, technical leadership, and participation in mission-critical programmes. These changes can be implemented through existing budget-cycle instruments coordinated by the Ministry of Finance, using Result Framework Documents and outcome-budget templates already in use for major missions.
There is also a broader institutional anchor. The Outer Space Treaty’s requirement that space exploration be carried out “for the benefit and in the interests of all” aligns with India’s constitutional commitment to equality of opportunity. Read alongside domestic budgetary practice, this supports extending distributive scrutiny beyond states to citizens as a matter of administrative clarity about who public space spending is ultimately meant to serve.
A Question of Timing, Not Intent
India’s space story is no longer just about achieving more with less. It is about sequencing institutions and investments in ways that keep future options open. Applied early at the design stage and later through fiscal analysis, gender budgeting offers a way to align efficiency with inclusion while choices remain reversible. Once spending patterns, leadership pipelines, and commercial interfaces settle, changing course becomes far more costly.
The real fiscal risk, then, is not acting too early, but discovering too late that neutrality had quietly narrowed the field.
Authors:
The discussion in this article is based on the authors’ working paper on the subject. Views are personal.