Union Budget will be presented on Feb 1: Speaker

Answering queries during a press conference today on Conference of Speakers and Presiding Officers of the Commonwealth, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla said that the union budget will be presented at 11 am on February 1 in the House.

The budget session of Parliament will commence on January 28 with address by President Droupadi Murmu to the joint sitting of the two Houses.

The 28th Conference of Speakers and Presiding Officers of the Commonwealth, being hosted by Parliament of India will be the largest CSPOC in terms of participation.

Om Birla said that the conference will be held from January 14 to 16 will discuss shared parliamentary values, democratic governance and institutional cooperation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the conference on January 15 in the Central Hall of Samvidhan Sadan, Parliament House Complex.

Speaker Om Birla is the Chairperson of this Conference.

The Conference of Speakers and Presiding Officers of Commonwealth being hosted by India will have the largest participation, Birla said.

In a post on X later, he said the conference will be attended by 61 Speakers and Presiding Officers from Commonwealth countries and semi-autonomous parliaments, including the Presidents of the IPU and the CPA.

"In this regard, it will be the largest CSPOC conference in the history of the forum," he said.

He said that the objective of CSPOC is to uphold and strengthen impartiality in the parliaments of Commonwealth nations, and to empower parliamentary democracy and institutions. India has earlier successfully hosted this conference in 1971, 1986, and 2010.

"This conference will undoubtedly showcase India's technological progress and its commitment to global parliamentary cooperation on the world stage," he said.

He said that work related to the conference has been done online and paper has not been used.

He said an app has been developed to enable all aspects of conference coordination, facilitation and information dissemination. A web-based event management system has been developed.

Answering queries, he said there will be no participation from Pakistan and Bangladesh does not have a Speaker at present with general elections scheduled to take place next month.

The Conference of Speakers and Presiding Officers of Commonwealth (CSPOC) 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 CSPOC with a secretariat to support its activities.

CSPOC brings together Speakers and Presiding Officers of 53 national parliaments of sovereign states of the Commonwealth.

CSPOC is an independent group with no formal affiliation with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA), the Commonwealth Secretariat or the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM). However, its membership is the same as that of CPA.

The conference aims to maintain, foster, and encourage impartiality and fairness on the part of Speakers and Presiding Officers of Parliaments.

It also seeks to promote knowledge and understanding of parliamentary democracy in its various forms and develop parliamentary institutions.

CSPOC operates on a two-year cycle, holding a conference of the full membership every two years, usually early in January, and a meeting of the Standing Committee at the same time the intervening year. (ANI)