Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman departed from the Finance Ministry for Parliament, carrying the Budget documents on a tablet wrapped in a ‘bahi khata’-styled pouch. This event precedes the presentation of the first Budget for the third successive NDA government. This will be Sitharaman’s seventh consecutive Budget presentation. She wore an off-white saree with a magenta border for the occasion.
Before heading to meet the President, Sitharaman, along with MoS (Finance) Pankaj Choudhary and their team of officials, posed for the traditional photograph outside the Finance Ministry.
The tradition of carrying budget documents in a briefcase, a colonial legacy, was abandoned by the NDA government in 2019. Sitharaman’s predecessors – Arun Jaitley and Piyush Goyal – had used the standard Budget briefcase.
