New Delhi (Delhi) [India], January 13 (HBTV): The Union Budget will be presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on February 1, which falls on a Sunday, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla said on Tuesday.
Answering queries during a press conference on the Conference of Speakers and Presiding Officers of the Commonwealth, Birla said the Union Budget will be presented in the House at 11 am on February 1. He added that the Budget Session of Parliament will commence on January 28 with President Droupadi Murmu addressing a joint sitting of the two Houses.
Birla said the 28th Conference of Speakers and Presiding Officers of the Commonwealth, being hosted by the Parliament of India, will be the largest CSPOC in terms of participation. He said the conference will be held from January 14 to 16 and will discuss shared parliamentary values, democratic governance, and institutional cooperation.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the conference on January 15 at the Central Hall of Samvidhan Sadan in the Parliament House Complex. Birla said he is the chairperson of the conference.
In a post on X later, Birla said the conference will be attended by 61 Speakers and Presiding Officers from Commonwealth countries and semi-autonomous parliaments, including the Presidents of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. ‘In this regard, it will be the largest CSPOC conference in the history of the forum,’ he said.
Birla said the objective of CSPOC is to uphold and strengthen impartiality in the parliaments of Commonwealth nations and to empower parliamentary democracy and institutions, noting that India has earlier hosted the conference in 1971, 1986, and 2010. He said the conference will showcase India’s technological progress and its commitment to global parliamentary cooperation.
He added that all work related to the conference has been carried out online, without the use of paper. An app has been developed to enable coordination, facilitation, and information dissemination, along with a web-based event management system.
Responding to queries, Birla said there will be no participation from Pakistan, while Bangladesh does not currently have a Speaker as general elections are scheduled to take place next month.
The Conference of Speakers and Presiding Officers of the Commonwealth was created in 1969 as an initiative of then Speaker of the House of Commons of Canada, Lucien Lamoureux. Since its inception, Canada has provided a secretariat to support its activities. CSPOC brings together Speakers and Presiding Officers of 53 national parliaments of sovereign Commonwealth states and functions as an independent group, with membership mirroring that of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. (ANI)