Nirmala Sitharaman the Finance Minister of India will give her fourth Annual Budget in a row on February 1 when she provides financial figures and tax recommendations for the financial year 2022-23.
Here is the history of the Union Budget in India:
The first Budget
The annual budget was originally established in India on April 7, 1860, when James Wilson a Scottish economist from the East India Company submitted it to the British Crown. On November 26, 1947, then-Finance Minister R K Shanmukham Chetty delivered the first budget of independent India.
The longest Budget speech
Nirmala Sitharaman set the record for the longest address when she delivered the Annual Budget for 2020-21 on February 1, 2020, lasting 2 hours and 42 minutes. She had to stop her presentation short after only two pages left because she was feeling unwell. She requested that the remainder of the speech be read out to the speaker.
She beat her previous record of 2 hours and 17 minutes set in July 2019 during her first Budget address.
The shortest Budget speech
Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel, the then-finance minister, spoke for only 800 words in 1977.
Most number of Budgets
Former Prime Minister Moraraji Desai has presented the most budgets in the country’s history. During his tenure as finance minister from 1962 to 1969, he delivered ten budgets, followed by P Chidambaram (nine), Pranab Mukherjee (eight), Yashwant Sinha (eight), and Manmohan Singh (six).
Budget time
Until 1999, the Union Budget was delivered at 5 p.m. on the final working day of February, as was customary throughout the British Empire. Former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha altered the time of the budget speech to 11 a.m. in 1999.
In 2017, Arun Jaitley began delivering the Union Budget on February 1st, breaking with the colonial-era practice of delivering the budget on the final working day of the month.
Language
The Union Budget was delivered in English until 1955. The Congress-led administration, on the other hand, eventually chose to issue the Budget documents in both Hindi as well as English.
Paperless
The COVID-19 outbreak rendered the Budget for 2021-22 paperless, which was a first in independent India.
The very first female finance minister
Sitharaman was the 2nd woman to deliver the budget in 2019, following Indira Gandhi, who did so in 1970-71. That year, Sitharaman ditched the conventional budget bag in favour of a traditional ‘bahi-khata’ emblazoned with the National Emblem to hold the presentation and other papers.
Budget for Railways
Until 2017, the railways budget and the Union Budget were submitted as distinct documents. After 92 years of being published separately, the railways budget was combined into the Union Budget in 2017 and published concurrently.
Amendment made in 2016
The release of Budget plans on February 1 was adopted in 2016, with the cabinet deciding to finish the procedure of approval of the Finance Bill before the start of a new fiscal year in April. The action by the BJP-led administration was indeed the second administrative endeavour made in the recent 15 years.
