Paperless Budget: Nirmala Sitharaman again presents from tablet

New Delhi: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday again took a digital tablet wrapped in a traditional bahi-khata style pouch as she headed for Parliament to present the Union Budget 2022-23 in a paperless format just like the last year.

She posed for the traditional 'briefcase' picture outside her office along with her team of officials before heading to meet the President. She, however, was holding a tablet instead of a briefcase to present the Budget in a digital format. "#AatmanirbharBharatKaBudget | From 'Bahi Khata' to 'Made in India' Tablet Finance Minister @nsitharaman carrying the Budget in the #paperless format in a tablet kept inside a red cover with National Emblem embossed on it instead of the briefcase or 'Bahi Khata'," Digital India tweeted.

With tablet carefully kept inside a red coloured cover with a golden coloured national emblem embossed on it instead of the briefcase, she went straight to Parliament after meeting the President at Rashtrapati Bhawan. Sitharaman, India's first full-time woman Finance Minister, had in July 2019 ditched the colonial legacy of a Budget Briefcase for the traditional Bahi-Khata to carry Union Budget Papers. She used the same in the following year, and in a pandemic-hit 2021, she swapped traditional papers with a digital tablet for carrying her speech as well as other Budget documents.

Her Budget for the fiscal year beginning April 2022 (FY2022-23) is the Modi government's 10th straight Budget since 2014 (including one interim Budget presented ahead of general elections in 2019). She was appointed as the Finance Minister when Narendra Modi swept to power again in the 2019 election and presented her maiden Budget on July 5, 2019. She used a red-cloth folder enclosed with a string and emblazoned with the national emblem to carry the Budget documents.

Earlier, finance ministers in different governments, including her predecessors in the Modi government - Arun Jaitley and Piyush Goyal, used the standard Budget briefcase. Before Sitharaman, a long-standing colonial tradition in connection with the Budget presentation was broken during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government when the then Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha presented the Budget at 11 am rather than at the traditional time of 5 pm. Since then, all the governments have been presenting the Budget at 11 am.

The tradition of carrying the Budget briefcase was a British legacy. The word 'Budget' originated from the French word 'bougette', which means leather briefcase. The "budget case" tradition started in the 18th century when the Chancellor of the Exchequer or Britain's budget chief was asked to 'open the budget' while presenting his annual statement. In 1860, the then British budget chief William E Gladstone carried his papers in a red suitcase with the Queen's monogram in gold. Budget briefcase came into being because Gladstone's speeches were extraordinarily long, and he needed a briefcase to carry his speech papers.

However, in India, different finance ministers carried different briefcases with colours of red, black, tan or brown.