File Photo: India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman
| Photo Credit:
Reuters
Sitharaman, along with Minister of State inthe Finance Ministry, Pankaj Chaudhary, took part in the traditional ‘halwa’ ceremony at the North Block on Raisina Hill, the old address of the Finance Ministry, as the new premises at the Kartyava Bhawan-I do not have a printing press. The ceremony is a customary ritual in which traditional dessert ‘halwa’ is prepared and served to officials and staff members of the finance ministry who are involved in the preparation of the budget.
The ‘Halwa ceremony’ precedes the ‘lock-in’ of the officials involved in preparation of the Union Budget, an official statement said. Maintaining the tradition, it was organised in the basement of North Block, which was attended by the finance minister and other high-ranking officials. As part of the ceremony, the Union Finance Minister also took a tour of the Budget Press and reviewed the preparations, besides extending her best wishes to the entire budget team.
Like the previous five full Union Budgets and one interim, the full Union Budget 2026-27 will also be delivered in a paperless form. All Union Budget documents, including the Annual Financial Statement (commonly known as the Budget), Demand for Grants (DG), Finance Bill, etc., will also be available on the ‘Union Budget Mobile App’ for hassle-free access to Budget documents by Members of Parliament (MPs) and the general public in a digitally accessible mode, it said.
The app is bilingual (English and Hindi) and will be available on both Android and iOS platforms, it said, adding that the Budget documents will be available on the Mobile App and the website after the completion of the Budget Speech by the Finance Minister in Parliament on February 1, 2026.
All Budget-related documents are printed at the North Block itself using a dedicated government press. Earlier, the documents were printed at Rashtrapati Bhavan, but this was shifted to a press on Minto Road in the national capital in 1950 after documents were leaked, and in 1980 to North Block.
The printing of several hundred copies of the voluminous budget documents was such an elaborate exercise that printing staff had to be quarantined inside the printing press in the basement of North Block for up to two weeks.
While the Narendra Modi government has done away with several traditional aspects of the Budget since coming to power in 2014, such as merging the Rail Budget with the main Budget from 2017, bringing forward the date of presentation to February 1 instead of the last date of that month, and moving to a digital format in 2021 — the ‘halwa’ ceremony as a tradition has survived.
Published on January 27, 2026
