Not Just Astronauts: Gender Diagnosis and Budgeting in India's Space Sector

Against the backdrop of United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs' (UNOOSA’s) 2025 Landmark Study, which documents women's 30 percent global workforce share in public space agencies—declining to 19 percent on boards—this paper applies gender budgeting framework to diagnose fiscal policy imperatives in the Department of Space (DoS), India. Aligning with the foundational principles of the UN Outer Space Treaty (1967), which mandates equitable benefits from space exploration "for all people," and with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 4 (quality education), 5 (gender equality), 9 (industry, innovation, and infrastructure), and 17 (partnerships for the goals), this analysis underscores the role of gender budgeting as a fiscal multiplier for inclusive growth in emerging space economies. Despite the absence of specifically targeted programmes for women in the space sector within the Ministry of Finance’s Gender Budgeting Statement 2025-26, our ex-post fiscal incidence analysis reveals that ISRO's significant achievements are inherently women-inclusive in their outcomes, despite workforce underrepresentation. We analysed the Space budgets across the space centres in India, and also across sanctioned Space projects to understand the fiscal incidence and marksmanship in space technology (e.g., launch vehicles, propulsion systems) and space applications (e.g., Earth observation, communication satellites). Key findings highlight marked variations in resource utilisation efficiency: utilisation rates ranged from a low of 10.9 percent at IN-SPACe—reflecting nascent private-sector integration challenges—to 21 percent at VSSC and 32 percent at URSC, where mature R&D pipelines drive higher absorption. Given the outcome of Space programmes including Earth Observation (EO) programmes and communication satellites for climate resilience have demographic than behavioural access, the units utilised patterns across income quintiles determine the fiscal incidence. Integrating results-linked gender budgeting into space policy thus emerges as a dual lever for equity—ensuring women's voice in high impact decision-making—and efficiency, by harnessing diverse perspectives to optimise resource allocation and innovation trajectories.