Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday participated in the traditional ‘halwa’ ceremony, marking the final stage of preparation for the Union Budget 2025-26, which will be unveiled on February 1 in the Lok Sabha.
The Finance Minister participated in the ceremony, took a round of the Budget Press, reviewed the preparations, and extended her best wishes to the officials involved.
It is held 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.
The ceremony is a customary ritual in which a traditional dessert, ‘halwa’, is prepared and served to the officials and staff members of the finance ministry involved in the preparation of the budget.
Sitharaman is set to present the Budget 2025-26, her eighth consecutive budget, against the backdrop of GDP growth moderating to 6.4 per cent for the financial year, compared to 8.2 per cent in the previous fiscal.
Like the previous four full Union Budgets and one interim budget, the full Union Budget 2025-26 will also be delivered in a paperless format.
All Union Budget documents, including the Annual Financial Statement (commonly known as the 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.
Besides 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 serves as a kind of ‘send-off’ for finance ministry officials and staff involved in the preparation of the Union government’s annual financial statement. They enter a ‘lock-in’ period, during which they stay in the basement of North Block, cut off from the outside world, to maintain secrecy around the final budget document.
They will emerge only after the finance minister completes her Budget speech in the Lok Sabha. The ceremony 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.
Since then, the budget has gone digital, with minimal documents printed and the bulk of distribution taking place via mobile app or website. Going digital has also shortened the lock-in period to just five days, compared to the previous duration of up to two weeks.
Printing Press: All budget-related documents are printed at North Block using a dedicated government press. Previously, the documents were printed at Rashtrapati Bhavan, but this was moved to a press on Minto Road in 1950 after documents were leaked, and to North Block in 1980.
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 end of the month, and moving to a digital format in 2021—the ‘halwa’ ceremony as a tradition has remained.
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