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Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present her seventh budget for the financial year 2024-25 in Parliament today on July 23. With this, she will also set a record for presenting the most number of Union Budgets. She will break former Finance Minister Morarji Desai's record of presenting six budgets. Desai was the Finance Minister during the tenure of Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi and later became the Prime Minister of India in 1977.
Sitharaman was made India's first full-time woman finance minister in 2019. This year Prime Minister Narendra Modi formed the government at the Centre for the second consecutive time. Since then, Sitharaman has presented 6 consecutive budgets, including an interim budget in February this year. The full budget for the financial year 2024-25 (April, 2024 to March, 2025) will be her 7th consecutive budget. She will surpass the record of Desai, who presented five consecutive full budgets and one interim budget between 1959 and 1964.
The first general budget of independent India was presented by the country's first finance minister R. K. Shanmukham Chetty on 26 November 1947. 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 9 times. Pranab Mukherjee presented 8 budgets during his tenure as Finance Minister. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh presented the budget 5 times in a row from 1991 to 1995, when he was also the Finance Minister in the P. Narasimha Rao government. The longest budget speech was given by Sitharaman on 1 February 2020 for 2 hours and 40 minutes. The interim budget speech of Hirubhai Muljibhai Patel in 1977 is the shortest speech ever, with only 800 words.
The budget is formally presented on the last day of February at 5 pm. In 1999, the time changed and the then Finance Minister Yashwant Singh 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 1 February, so that the government could complete the process of parliamentary approval by the end of March.