New Delhi, March 1 (IANS) It started end-November, picked up steam in the first week of February and by the time the annual exercise of budget presentation ended Monday, some 200 officials at North Block led by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee were exhausted.
‘I am happy this is over. For one week, the basement of North Block was our home — no visitors, no phone calls. There has to be this secrecy over budget. So we ate, slept, worked from there,’ said a senior official who did not wish to be identified by name.
‘We finally left for home at 1 p.m. to be precise when the finance minister ended his speech,’ the official told IANS.
‘This time food was not that bad at all. This is our only indulgence during these days,’ the official said, adding the catering this time was not left entirely to the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp.
As senior officials explained, most of the budget papers are printed two days in advance at the security press in North Block. The last document to be printed is the speech of the finance minister.
‘Even the cabinet, which has to meet to approve the budget, gets to see it just around 10 minutes before the minister reads the speech. Even if a small portion gets leaked, the finance minister can lose the job. That’s the norm,’ an official said.
The home ministry deputes a special team to guard the budget papers. There are also sniffer dogs to see to it that someone does not sneak in when the documents get into gunny bags.
Another official told IANS that the maximum number of finance ministry employees poured in Feb 27 — and no one slept that night.
‘Not one person had a wink of sleep,’ the official said. ‘Dinner was on the house, so was breakfast on Feb 28 and lunch too. There was an unending supply of tea and coffee. Our freedom came at 1 in the afternoon.’
This time, there were some changes in the top leadership of the finance minuistry — but at the end it boiled down to the following officials:
– Finance Secretary Sushma Nath
– Economic Affairs Secretary R. Gopalan
– Revenue Secretary Sunil Mitra
– Disinvestment Secretary Sumit Bose
– Financial Services Secretary Shashi Kant Sharma
– Chief Economic Advisor Kaushik Basu
– Central Board of Direct Taxes Chairman Sudhir Chandra
– Central Board of Excise and Customs Chairman Sumit Dutt Majumder
