New Delhi: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is poised to create history when she presents her seventh straight budget on Tuesday, June 23, for 2024-25, surpassing the record of former Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Desai became India's PM in 1977 after holding the position of FM under Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.
The 65-year-old Sitharaman was appointed India's first full-time female FM in 2019 following PM Narendra Modi's decisive reelection to a second term. She has since unveiled six consecutive budgets, along with an interim one in February of this year.
Her eighth consecutive budget will be the whole budget for the 2024–25 fiscal year, which runs from April 2024 to March 2025. She will surpass Desai's record, who, from 1959 to 1964, submitted five consecutive complete budgets and one interim budget. Desai, however, holds the record of presenting the most numbers of budgets at 10.
The budget session for today is scheduled to begin at 11 AM and will be streamed live on multiple platforms, including Sansad TV and the official government website for the Union Budget. After the Union Budget 2024–25 is presented in the Lok Sabha, she will table the budget an hour later.
Benchmark indices -- BSE Sensex and Nifty50 -- started higher on Tuesday, ahead of the Union Budget 2024-25 presentation by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. The BSE Sensex was at 80,741, up 239 points or 0.3 per cent, while the Nifty50 stayed around 24,575, up 66 points or 0.27 per cent. The BSE MidCap and the BSE SmallCap indices were also up 0.3 per cent each.
Since the February 1 Interim Budget had no significant policy changes or additional benefits for the middle class, all eyes are on the full budget. It is anticipated that the Union Budget will help the productive sectors of the economy by striking a delicate balance between promoting consumption and investment.
Once more, it is imperative to attend to the concerns of important allies such as Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) and N Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party (TDP), whose backing was essential for the BJP to win its third straight term even though it did not win a majority in the most recent Lok Sabha elections.
Here are some of the interesting facts related to the Budget presentation in Independent India.
FIRST BUDGET: The first budget of independent India was presented by then FM RK Shanmugam Chetty on November 26, 1947, for ₹197.1 crore.
MOST NUMBER OF BUDGETS: The record for most budgets presented is held by former PM Morarji Desai. In his capacity as finance minister under Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri, he had introduced 11 budgets in total.
On February 28, 1959, he unveiled his first budget. He then unveiled complete budgets the next two years, plus an interim one in 1962 followed by two complete budgets. He then provided three complete budgets in 1967, 1968, and 1969, for a total of 10 budgets, after four more years. In 1967, he presented another interim budget.
SECOND HIGHEST NUMBER OF BUDGETS: Former FM P Chidambaram presented the budget on nine occasions. On March 19, 1996, he made his first presentation of the budget under Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda's United Front government.
The next year, he submitted a second budget under the same administration, and returned again to limelight when the Congress-led UPA took office in 2014. From 2004 until 2008, he submitted five budgets. He returned to the finance ministry in 2013 and 2014 after serving as the Union Home Minister for a term.
THIRD HIGHEST NUMBER OF BUDGETS: During his tenure as FM, Pranab Mukherjee unveiled eight budgets. In the Congress-led UPA government, he presented budgets in 1982, 1983, and 1984 along with five consecutive ones from February 2009 to March 2012.
LONGEST BUDGET SPEECH: Sitharaman's presentation on February 1, 2020, which lasted two hours and forty minutes, now holds the record for the longest budget speech. With two pages still to go, she interrupted her speech at that point.
SHORTEST BUDGET SPEECH: At barely 800 words, Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel's 1977 interim Budget speech holds the record for being the shortest to date.
TIMING: Traditionally, India's budget was presented at 5 PM on the final business day of February till 1999. The timing followed a colonial era practice when the announcements could be made in London and India at the same time. Yashwant Sinha, the FM of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led government at the time, modified this to 11 AM.
DATE: The budget presentation date was rescheduled in 2017 to February 1 in order to allow the administration to complete the parliamentary approval procedure by the end of March and enable the budget to be implemented from April 1.
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