Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will be presenting the Budget for fiscal year 2022-23 on February 1. The key financial plan for the next financial year will be presented in the Parliament where the government introduces schemes and allocates expenditure.
Ahead of the big day, let us have a look at some of the interesting facts about the budget.
- Until 2016, the Budget was presented on the last day of February until Arun Jaitley changed it to February 1 from 2017 onwards.
- The “halwa ceremony” which marked the commencement for printing the Budget document earlier has been cancelled this year due to Delhi’s pandemic situation.
- RK Shanmukham Chetty presented the first budget of Independent India on November 26, 1947. Chetty had served as India’s first Finance Minister from 1947 to 1948.
- Morarji Desai presented 10 Budgets – the highest so far, followed by P Chindambaram who presented 9 Budgets and Pranab Mukherjee who presented 8 Budgets.
- Interestingly, Morarji Desai presented Budget twice on his birthday on February 29 – a leap year in 1964 and in 1968.
- There have been 73 annual budgets, 14 interim budgets and 4 special budgets/mini-budgets since Independence.
- Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi are the only Prime Ministers who presented a budget.
- Nirmala Sitharaman made a record in 2020 by speaking for nearly 2 hours 40 minutes – the longest budget speech in history. With 2 pages left, she requested the speech be cut short as she was feeling unwell after speaking at length for so long.
- Former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s first budget speech in 2014 was with 253 paragraphs which went on for 2 hours and 10 minutes, which is the second longest speech after Sitharaman. The third, fourth and fifth spots for longest Budget speeches are also held by Arun Jaitley, late BJP veteran.
- Nirmala Sitharaman is India’s first full-time woman Finance Minister – a position only held by Indira Gandhi as an additional charge when she was the PM.
- Sitharaman also ditched the colonial tradition of carrying the Budget in a briefcase when she came in with a ‘bahi khata’ in 2019 to present the Budget. The documents were wrapped in a silk red cloth with the national emblem on top.
- Last year, the Budget went paperless for the first time ever as Sitharaman read her speech from a tablet. The government also launched the Union Budget Mobile App for people to access the budget on their smartphones.
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