Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented 2024-25 Interim Budget for 58 minutes on Thursday, her shortest-ever speech so far. With India going for the Lok Sabha elections in three months, the FM made no major announcements, including no changes in the income tax rates. The speech focused on Viksit Bharat for 2047.
Union Budget 2024 Live
In the last Budget, the finance minister spoke for 87 minutes, which was her shortest-ever speech. She holds the record of delivering the longest Budget speech of 2 hours and 40 minutes in 2020. She spoke extensively on employment, healthcare and infrastructure development.
In 2019, Sitharaman’s Budget speech lasted for 2 hours 20 minutes. For the first time, a full-time woman finance minister presented the Union Budget in that year. Chief announcements included a 10-point vision for the decade, benefits for MSMEs and start-ups and opening pre-filing of income-tax returns, among others.
Her Budget speeches in 2021 and 2022 lasted for 1 hour 40 minutes and 1 hour 31 minutes.
Other Finance Ministers’ Budget Speeches
Former finance minister Jaswant Singh in his 2003 Budget speech spoke for 2 hours and 13 minutes while former finance minister Arun Jaitley in 2014 spoke for 2 hours and 10 minutes.
In terms of word count, the longest Budget speech was delivered by Manmohan Singh in 1991. The speech had 18,650 words. Arun Jaitley’s 2018 Budget speech had 18,604 words. He has the second most words in the speech.
The shortest Budget in terms of words was presented in 1977 by the then finance minister Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel. The speech consisted of 800 words.
The record for the most number of Budgets presented is held by Morarji Desai. In his tenure as finance minister in 1962-69, he delivered 10 Union Budgets.
Desai is followed by P Chidambaram with 9 Budgets, Pranab Mukherjee and Yashwant Sinha with 8 Budgets, and Manmohan Singh with 6 Budgets.
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