New Delhi. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is set to create history by presenting her seventh consecutive budget for the financial year 2024-25 on Tuesday. In this way, she will break the record of former Prime Minister Morarji Desai. However, the record of presenting the budget the most number of times is still held by Desai. Sitharaman will turn 65 next month. She was made the first full-time woman finance minister of India in 2019. This year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi formed the government for the second consecutive time at the Center. Since then, Sitharaman has presented six consecutive budgets, including an interim one in February this year.
The full budget for the financial year 2024-25 (April 2024 to March 2025) will be her seventh consecutive budget. She will surpass the record of Desai, who presented five consecutive full budgets and one interim budget between 1959 and 1964. Some facts related to the presentation of the budget in independent India are as follows. The first general budget of independent India was presented on November 26, 1947 by the country’s first Finance Minister RK Shanmukham Chetty.
Former Prime Minister Morarji Desai presented a total of 10 budgets as Finance Minister during the tenure of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and later Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram presented the budget on nine occasions. Pranab Mukherjee presented eight budgets during his tenure as Finance Minister. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh presented the budget five times in a row between 1991 and 1995, when he was the Finance Minister in the P V Narasimha Rao government.
The longest budget speech was given by Sitharaman on February 1, 2020, for two hours and 40 minutes. The interim budget speech of Hirubhai Muljibhai Patel in 1977 is the shortest ever speech, which has only 800 words. The budget is traditionally presented on the last day of February at 5 pm. In 1999, the time was changed and Yashwant Singh, the then finance minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, presented the budget at 11 am. Since then the budget is presented at 11 am. After this, in 2017, the date of presenting the budget was changed to February 1, so that the government could complete the parliamentary approval process by the end of March.