Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present a record ninth consecutive budget on February 1, which is expected to contain reform measures aimed at shoring up economic growth amid a volatile geopolitical situation.
This will take Sitharaman closer to the record of 10 budgets that were presented by former Prime Minister Morarji Desai over different time periods. Desai presented a total of six budgets during his tenure as finance minister in 1959-1964, and four budgets between 1967 and 1969. Former finance ministers P Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee had presented nine and eight budgets, respectively, under different prime ministers.
Sitharaman, however, will continue to hold the record of presenting the most budgets on the trot–nine straight budgets under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. She was in 2019 appointed as India’s first full-time woman finance minister when Prime Minister Modi won a decisive second term. After PM Modi came back to power in 2024 for the third time, Sitharaman continued to retain her finance portfolio.
So far, she has presented a total of eight straight budgets, including an interim one in February 2024. Notably, the first-ever Union Budget of independent India was presented on November 26, 1947, by the nation’s first finance minister, R K Shanmukham Chetty. In terms of numbers, it is the former Prime Minister Morarji Desai who holds the record for presenting the largest number of budgets. He has presented a total of 10 budgets during his tenure as finance minister under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and later under Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri.
This is followed by former finance minister P Chidambaram who presented the budget on nine occasions. He first presented the budget on March 19, 1996, during the United Front government led by Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda. Pranab Mukherjee presented eight budgets during his tenure as finance minister.
He presented budgets in 1982, 1983 and 1984 and five straight ones between February 2009 and March 2012 in the Congress-led UPA government.
Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh presented five straight budgets between 1991 and 1995 when he was finance minister in the PV Narasimha Rao government. Sitharaman also holds the record for the longest budget speech when her presentation on February 1, 2020, lasted two hours and 40 minutes. At the time, she cut short her speech with two pages remaining.
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