KOCHI: Kerala-born economist Lekha Chakraborty is among 22 women public finance professionals from across the world featured in ‘Women in Public Finance: Stories of Gender in Budgeting’, a new global volume published by Taylor & Francis.
The book brings together first-person accounts of women working in public financial management and gender budgeting, offering rare insights into the barriers they encountered and the breakthroughs they achieved in a field long dominated by male perspectives.
Edited by Manal Fouad, a former assistant director with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Maja Murisic, the book takes an unusual approach by moving beyond conventional technical accounts to capture the personal experiences that shaped the contributors’ professional journeys.
“I met Manal when I was leading the IMF global survey on gender budgeting from the Asia-Pacific region. Later, she told me about the book and asked me to contribute a chapter. Initially, I wrote a technical piece, but she and Maja wanted my story,” Lekha tells TNIE. Raised in Thiruvananthapuram, Lekha is now with the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) and serves on the governing boards of the International Institute of Public Finance, Munich, and the Levy Economics Institute, New York. She is internationally recognised for her work on gender budgeting and macro-fiscal policy.
For Lekha, however, gender budgeting has never been merely an academic discipline. Its roots lie in her childhood and in the struggles of her mother, a government nurse who raised two children after being abandoned by her husband.
“My mum, a nurse in government service, was abandoned by my dad when I was three years old,” she recalls.
The news of the divorce came in a simple inland letter. The family struggled to make ends meet, but her mother remained determined that her children should study.