Covid-19 pandemic effect: Budget documents will not be printed this year

Risk factor: Printing requires staff to be cooped up in North Block for a fortnight

For the first time since the Union Budget of independent India was first presented on November 26, 1947, the Budget documents will not be printed. No trucks loaded with Budget papers, a familiar sight at Parliament on Budget Day, will be seen parked outside the building this time round.
 

The printing of the crucial documents is yet another casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic.
 

Every year, the documents are printed by the finance ministry’s in-house printing press. This year, however, both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha secretariats have been able to convince the members of Parliament (MPs) to make do with a soft copy of the documents. Convincing all the members wasn’t easy, said an official involved with the work at the secretariat, “but it has been done”.
 

The speaker and the vice-president were able to persuade the members that it was an either/or situation: Either all get a hard copy, or none does, the official said. There was no way a small print run could have been done for members who are not tech savvy, while having the rest make do with a soft copy.
 

The decision has been taken to mitigate the risk of Covid-19 infection, the official said. Even if a few copies were to be printed, the same staff strength would be needed to run the machines, proof read the copies and bind them into books.
 

In an ordinary year, these employees, numbering a 100-odd, would be cooped up in a set of rooms for at least a fortnight. But this time, the risk from such an exercise was massive, it was felt.
 

Once the Budget documents are ready, another few hundred people enter the press the night before Budget Day to lug them, seal them in bags and transport them. The MPs, it was argued, ran the risk of being infected with the papers and from the carriers.
 

Calling off the printing exercise does not save the government much money, though. Incidentally, quite a few state assemblies have already adopted the paper-less route.
 

With the printing called off, the halwa ceremony that the finance ministry staff used to carry out every year at the onset of the printing work, too, has not taken place this year.
 

Ritually, every year, the non-executive staff who work to print the Budget documents in the basement of North Block would offer halwa as prasad to everyone. They would then disappear into the rooms for the next couple of weeks and emerge only when the job was done.
 

Year on year
 

• Printing of Budget documents starts about a fortnight ahead of the Budget being presented in Parliament
 

• The printing would begin with a customary halwa ceremony in which large quantities of halwa is prepared and served to the officers and support staff involved in the exercise
 

• Thereafter, the staff remains isolated and stays in the North Block office until the Budget is presented
 

• Until 2018, finance ministers carried the Budget in a leather briefcase — a tradition established by India’s first finance minister (1947 to 1949), R K Shanmukham Chetty
 

• On July 5, 2019, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman ditched the briefcase and instead carried the Budget documents in a bahi khaata (a traditional Indian method of bookkeeping)
 

• Until 1999, the Union Budget was announced at 5 pm on the last working day of February
 

• Yashwant Sinha, the finance minister under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance government, changed this tradition and announced the 1999 Union Budget at 11 am
 

• In 2016, Arun Jaitley, as finance minister, announced that the Budget would henceforth be presented on February 1. The Rail Budget, until then presented separately for 92 years, was also merged with the Union Budget