• Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman participated in the traditional ‘halwa ceremony’ on January 24.

• The ceremony is organised every year 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.

• It is performed before the ‘lock-in’ process of Budget preparation begins.

• It marks the final stage for preparation of the Interim Budget 2024 to be unveiled on February 1 in the Lok Sabha.

• As part of the ceremony, the finance minister also took a round of the Budget Press and reviewed the preparations besides extending her best wishes to the officials concerned. 

• Like the previous three full Union Budgets, Interim Union Budget 2024 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 documents by Members of Parliament and the general public.

• The Budget documents will be available on the app after the finance minister completes the Budget speech in Parliament on February 1, 2024.

What is ‘halwa ceremony’?

• The ceremony is an annual ritual in which the 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 a kind of a send-off for the officials involved with the preparation of the Union government’s Budget documents. 

• 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 Budget documents. 

• They will emerge only after the finance minister completes her Budget Speech in the Lok Sabha on February 1. 

• 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. 

• 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.

• Going digital meant that the lock-in period has gotten shorter to just five days.

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