Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman again opted for a bahi khata, a ledger wrapped in a red-coloured cloth, as she arrived in Parliament to present her second Budget. Sitharaman broke away from long-standing traditions of colonial-era when she ditched the briefcase and opted for traditional bahi khata while presenting her full Budget in 2019.

The word ‘budget’ has its origin in the French word Bougette, which means leather briefcase. Traditionally, budget documents -which primarily include papers related to revenue receipt and expenditure as well as the speech of finance minister - were carried in a brown briefcase, a legacy passed on by the British. However, traditional Indian businessmen used bahi khata to maintain their books of account.“The government is following Indian tradition and bahi khata symbolises our departure from the slavery of Western thought,” Chief Economic Advisor Krishnamurthy Subramanian had saidlast year.

“Sitharaman believes that leather made products are notauspicious for the big occasion, so she avoided the leather bag and took thebahi khata wrapped in the red cloth. This is considered to be auspicious,” hehad further said.In July last year, Sitharaman had said that Modi government isnot a “suitcase-carrying government”.In a veiled attack on Congress, she hadconnected her idea of carrying budget documents wrapped in a red cloth insteadof a briefcase with alleged corruption in the previous UPA government at theCentre.

“For Budget 2019, I did not carry a suitcase. We are not asuitcase-carrying government. A suitcase also denotes something else:suitcase-taking, suitcase-giving. Modi ji’s government is not a suitcasegovernment,” she had said at the International Business Conference ofNagarathar in July 2019.

Before Sitharaman, a long-standing tradition in connectionwith the budget presentation was broken during the Atal Bihari Vajpayeegovernment with the then Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha presenting the budgetat 11 am rather than at the traditional time of 5 pm.

Since then all governments have been presenting the budgetat 11 am.