New Delhi, July 21 (HS). Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is going to create history by presenting the seventh consecutive budget for the financial year 2024-25 in Parliament on Tuesday, July 23. In this way, she will break the record of former Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Because she will present the budget for the seventh consecutive time as Finance Minister in his third term with the same Prime Minister.
However, the record of presenting the budget the most number of times is still with Desai as she has presented it twice.
During the tenure of the Prime Ministers, he presented the budget 10 times as Finance Minister.
The Finance Ministry said in a statement released on 'X' post on Sunday that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will table the Union Budget 2024-25 in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, July 23. Sitharaman will turn 65 next month. Prime Minister Narendra Modi made Nirmala Sitharaman the first full-time woman Finance Minister of India when he formed the government for the second consecutive time at the Center in 2019.
Sitharaman has presented six consecutive budgets so far, including an interim one in February this year. The full budget for the current financial year 2024-25 (April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025) will be her seventh consecutive budget. She will surpass the record of Morarji 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 26 November 1947 by the country's first finance minister RK Shanmukham Chetty. After this, former Prime Minister Morarji Desai has presented a total of 10 budgets as finance minister during the tenure of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri.
Former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram presented the budget nine times, while 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 PV Narasimha Rao government. Sitharaman delivered the longest budget speech of two hours and 40 minutes on February 1, 2020. The interim budget speech of Hirubhai Muljibhai Patel in 1977 is the shortest speech ever, with only 800 words.
The budget was traditionally presented on the last day of February at 5 pm. However, the timing was changed in 1999 and the then finance minister Yashwant Singh in Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government presented the budget at 11 am. Since then the budget was 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.
Hindustan News / Prajesh Shankar / Ramanuja
