(LiveMint)
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will present the interim Budget for 2019-20 fiscal on 1 February 2019. The Finance Ministry on Wednesday said “the work for preparation ofinterim Budget 2019-20 has already commenced and is now gaining momentum”. It has already sought inputs from different central ministries for the budget speech, which would be the last budget of the current BJP-led NDA government before the 2019 general polls.
Last month, the ministry began the budgetary exercise for 2019-20. During the process, meetings were held with the ministries of steel, power, and housing and urban development, among others, to finalise revised expenditure for the current fiscal and projections for the next financial year. The ministry will impose quarantine from 3 December, which will bar the entry of media persons into the North Block, the seat of the country’s Finance Ministry, till the date of presentation of the interim Budget by the finance minister in Parliament on 1 February 2019, it said.
This will be the sixth consecutive Budget to be presented by Jaitley. As per practice, a vote-on-account or approval for essential government spending for a limited period is taken in an election year and a full-fledged budget is presented by the new government. The Narendra Modi-led government scrapped the colonial-era tradition of presenting the budget at the end of February. With the preponement of budget, ministries are now allocated their budgeted funds from the start of the financial year beginning April.
