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. File
| Photo Credit: ANI

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday (January 24, 2025) participated in a traditional ‘halwa’ ceremony, marking the final stage for the preparation of Union Budget 2025-26 to be unveiled on February 1 in the Lok Sabha.

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.

It is organised in the basement of North Block, which houses the ministry in the national capital and is attended by the Finance Minister and other high-ranking officials.

According to sources, the Finance Minister participated in the ceremony and also took a round of the Budget Press and reviewed the preparations besides extending her best wishes to the officials concerned.

Ms. Sitharaman is going to present Budget 2025-26, the eighth straight budget in a row, on the backdrop of GDP growth moderating to 6.4% in the financial year as against 8.2% recorded in the previous fiscal.

Like the previous four full Union Budgets and one Interim, the full Union Budget 2025-26 will also be delivered in paperless form.

All the Union Budget documents, including the Annual Financial Statement (commonly known as Budget), Demand for Grants (DG), Finance Bill etc. as prescribed by the Constitution, will be available on the ‘Union Budget Mobile App’ for hassle-free access to Budget.

Besides Ms. Sitharaman, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary and other senior officials, including Finance Secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey, Economic Affairs Secretary Ajay Seth and other senior officials were present at the ceremony.

Halwa ceremony

It is a kind of a ‘send-off’ for Finance Ministry officials and staff involved in the preparation of the Union government’s annual financial statement. They enter what is called a ‘lock-in’ period, during which they stay in the basement of North Block, cut off from the world outside with a view to maintaining the secrecy around the final budget document.

They will emerge only after the Finance Minister completes her Budget speech in the Lok Sabha. It is considered a gesture of appreciation for those who have worked on the Budget. The basement of North Block houses a printing press that was traditionally used to print budget documents for 40 years from 1980 to 2020.

Thereafter, the budget went digital with bare minimum documents printed and the bulk distribution happening via mobile app or on the website. Going digital also meant that the lock-in period has become shorter to just five days from the previous one which lasted up to two weeks.

Printing Press

All Budget-related documents are printed at 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.

Tradition

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.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi chairs a meeting with eminent economists and sectoral experts, at NITI Aayog in New Delhi on Tuesday. Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Suman Bery, Principal Secretary to the PM PK Mishra and others also seen.
| Photo Credit: ANI

Job creation, improving farm productivity, and mobilising public funds for infrastructure development were some of the issues that figured during the interaction between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and economists ahead of the 2025-26 Union Budget.

The Prime Minister on Tuesday (December 24, 2024) met eminent economists and sectoral experts at NITI Aayog to hear their views and suggestions for the upcoming Budget.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is scheduled to present the Budget for 2025-26 in the Lok Sabha on February 1, 2025.

According to an official statement, PM Modi emphasised that Viksit Bharat can be achieved through a fundamental change in mindset, which is focused towards making India developed by 2047.

The participants shared their views on several issues, including navigating challenges posed by global economic uncertainties and geopolitical tensions, strategies to enhance employment particularly among the youth, and create sustainable job opportunities across sectors.

Suggestions were also made on aligning education and training programmes with the evolving needs of the job market, enhancing agricultural productivity and creating sustainable rural employment opportunities, attracting private investment and mobilising public funds for infrastructure projects to boost economic growth.

Suggestions were also made for promoting financial inclusion and boosting exports and attracting foreign investment, as per the statement.

Renowned economists and analysts present at the interaction included Surjit S. Bhalla, Ashok Gulati, Sudipto Mundle, Dharmakirti Joshi, Janmejaya Sinha, Madan Sabnavis, Amita Batra, Ridham Desai, Chetan Ghate, Bharat Ramaswami, Soumya Kanti Ghosh, Siddhartha Sanyal, Laveesh Bhandari, Rajani Sinha, Keshab Das, Pritam Banerjee, Rahul Bajoria, Nikhil Gupta, and Shashwat Alok, the statement added.

The meeting comes in the backdrop of worries around deceleration of economic growth.

The Indian economy grew 6.7% in the June quarter and 5.4% in the July-September period.

Recently, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) lowered India’s economic growth forecast to 6.5% for the current financial year from its earlier estimate of 7% due to lower-than-expected growth in private investment and housing demand.

The multilateral development bank has also lowered India’s growth forecast for the 2025-26 financial year.

Earlier this month, the Reserve Bank of India also significantly lowered the growth projection for the current fiscal year to 6.6% from 7.2% earlier.

Next year’s Budget will also be watched for any pre-emptive measures the government might take in response to a possible hike in U.S. tariffs after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump last week said India charges a lot of tariff and threatened to impose reciprocal tax.