Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday (January 27, 2026) attended the traditional ‘halwa’ ceremony, marking the final phase of preparation of the Union Budget 2026-27, which will be unveiled in the Lok Sabha on February 1.
The ceremony was held at the North Block on Raisina Hill, the old address of the Finance Ministry, as the new premises at Kartyava Bhawan-I do not have a printing press.
The Finance Minister and most of her team were shifted from the iconic and majestic North Block to the modern office of the Central Secretariat at Kartavya Bhawan in September 2025.
The ceremony is a customary ritual in which the traditional dessert ‘Halwa’ is prepared and served to officials and employees of the Ministry of Finance who are involved in the preparation of the budget.
The ‘Halwa ceremony’ precedes the ‘lockout’ of officials involved in the preparation of the Union Budget, an official statement said.
In keeping with tradition, it was held in the basement of the North Block, attended by the Minister of Finance and other high-ranking officials.
The Union Budget will be presented on 1 February 2026.
As part of the ceremony, the Union Finance Minister also reviewed the Budget Press and reviewed the preparations, besides wishing the entire budget team all the best.
At the ceremony at Halwa, the finance minister was accompanied by state finance minister Pankaj Chaudhary and secretaries of all departments under the finance ministry and other senior officials involved in budget preparation.
Ms Sitharaman will present the 2026-27 budget, her ninth budget in a row, on the back of expected GDP growth of 7.6% this financial year amid global geopolitical headwinds.
Like the previous five full Union budgets and one interim one, the 2026-27 full Union budget will be delivered paperless.
All the Union Budget documents including the Annual Financial Statement (commonly known as 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 for Members of Parliament (MPs) and general public in a digitally accessible mode.
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 on the website after the completion of the Finance Minister’s Budget speech in Parliament on February 1, 2026.
The halwa ceremony
It is a sort of ‘posting’ for finance ministry officials and staff involved in the preparation of the annual financial statement of the Union government. They are entering a so-called “closure” period, during which they remain in the basement of the Northern Bloc, cut off from the outside world, in order to maintain secrecy around the final budget document.
It will appear only after the Finance Minister completes her Budget speech in the Lok Sabha. It is considered a gesture of appreciation to those who worked on the budget. In the basement of the North Block, there is a printing press that has traditionally been used to print budget documents for 40 years, from 1980 to 2020.
The budget was then digitized with minimal printed documents and mass distribution through a mobile app or website. The switch to digital broadcasting also meant that the lock-in period was reduced to just five days, compared to the previous period of up to two weeks.
Printing press
All budget related documents are printed in the North Block itself using a dedicated government press. Earlier, the documents were printed at Rashtrapati Bhavan, but this was shifted to the printing press at Minto Road in the state capital in 1950 after the documents were leaked, and in 1980 to the North Block.
Printing several hundred copies of the voluminous budget documents was such a complex task that the printers had to be quarantined inside the printer in the basement of the North Block for up to two weeks.
Tradition
While the Narendra Modi government, since coming to power in 2014, has removed several traditional aspects of the budget, such as merging the railway budget with the 2017 main budget, moving the submission date to February 1 instead of the last date of the month, and going digital in 2021 – the ‘halwa’ ceremony has survived as a tradition.
Published – 27 Jan 2026 18:05 IST
