According to sources, the finance minister attended the ceremony and reviewed the preparations besides taking a circuit of the budget coverage and extending best wishes to the stakeholders.
Sitharaman is expected to present Budget 2025-26, the eighth straight budget in a row, on the back of moderated GDP growth to 6.4% in the financial year as against 8.2% recorded in the previous fiscal. is.
Like the previous four complete union budgets and one interim, the complete union budget 2025-26 will also be delivered in paperless format.
All union budget documents including annual financial statements (commonly referred to as budget), grant demands (DG), finance bills etc. are hassle-free with “Union Budget Mobile App” as provided in the Constitution available for. Access to budget. Besides Sitharaman, finance minister Pankaj Chaudhary and other senior officials, finance secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey, economic affairs director Ajay Seth and other senior officials attended the ceremony. Halwa Ceremony: This is a kind of ‘send-off’ for the Ministry of Finance officials and staff involved in preparing the annual financial statements of the federal government. They enter what is called a “lock-in” period, during which they remain underground in the North Block and are cut off from the outside world in order to maintain secrecy regarding the final budget document.
They appear only after the finance minister completes her budget speech in the Lok Sabha. This is considered a gesture of gratitude to those who worked on the budget. In the basement of the North Block is a printing press traditionally used to print budget documents for 40 years, from 1980 to 2020.
Then budgets went digital, with minimal documents printed and bulk distribution on mobile apps or websites. Also, going digital has reduced the lock-in period to just five days from the previous period, which lasted up to two weeks.
Printing Machine: All budget-related documents are printed in North Block itself using a dedicated government press. Earlier, the document was printed at Rashtrapati Bhavan, which was shifted to the capital’s Minto Road press in 1950 after the document was leaked to North Block in 1980. Printing hundreds of copies of the huge budget document required the printing staff to be isolated inside the printing press located in the basement of the North Block for up to two weeks.
Tradition: The Narendra Modi government has done away with some traditional aspects of the budget since coming to power in 2014, such as merging the main budget and railway budget in 2017, but the last budget I submitted the presentation date as February 1st instead. date of the month, and moving to digital format in 2021 – the ‘Halwa’ ceremony as a tradition survived.
