Media coverage of the Union budget was dominated by certain stereotypes. Business and finance sector, as well as IT and science, and this year, the farm sector are given high and serious profile, with expert analysis.
However, in getting opinions after the budget two other categories are also always included — women and “man on the street” or the aam admi — and nowadays “youth”.

The women consultation has a certain light entertainment flavour to it. Women, who are running their homes — home makers — and wedded to oil and pulses take up the bulk of the audience. They make realistic comments such as: prices in the market are not coming down and therefore the real issue is prices.

Then the anchor or one of the experts explain; how the budget tries to balance various items; how the inflation is part of the advantages of growth and how attempts are being made to control it.

And then comes the hard questions to these women.

Here is a farmer. He wants higher prices and you want cheaper food. Do you want to make him starve and die? Women look embarrassed. Then there is a clip, where there are four women in a family and the elder says “this younger woman who has been going to office in a two-wheeler can now afford the Nano”. Can you object to that upward move of the young woman?

Then, for getting at the young, a few smartly dressed urban young women and men, take the mike and make remarks like they welcome the reduction in price of vehicles.

This contrasts interactions with a market expert. He is able to separate global financial jumps and shocks, national financial issues — such as the rupee-dollar rates — and gives what is called informed detailed analysis of the plusses and the minuses of the policy to financial markets.

The analysis of the budget does not include the analysis by women who have been looking at and knowing, for example, the economic role, condition and requirements of women as the major workforce in India’s growing economy — whether it is agriculture, small scale industry, or horticulture.

Backroom work, ie not recognised as an occupation and unpaid, as an economic contribution plays a very big role in what is called household production and put out home-based work. But women talk is made into personal and usually a category called housewives.

The Karnataka budget can be different and call attention to the role women are playing in different sectors and then bring attention to the economic agents which are responsible for the economic outcomes and how the budget and the plan would respond to that.

Karnataka could move out of the stereotype of seeing the domains as social domain, industrial domain, education and health domain and consider people within these domains, which in fact is the intention, but not the act.