Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present her 6th consecutive Union Budget 2024 shortly in Parliament. With this presentation, she will etch her name into the record books, joining the exclusive club of former Prime Minister Morarji Desai, who also presented five consecutive full budgets and one interim budget during his term.
Sitharaman made history as the first full-time woman finance minister and has been consistently presenting full budgets since July 2019. It is noteworthy that Morarji Desai holds the record for the maximum number of budget presentations by a Prime Minister, having delivered the budget a remarkable 10 times.
FM Sitharaman will present interim budget for the first time
Sitharaman will present her first interim budget today. Earlier in the year 2019, due to the ill health of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Piyush Goyal, who was in charge of the Finance Minister at that time, had presented the interim budget.
Sitharaman will overtake Manmohan Singh and Arun Jaitley
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the interim budget on 1 February 2024. The full budget this year will likely be presented in July after the general elections. The interim budget to be presented for the financial year 2024-25 on February 1 will be voted on account. This will give the government the right to spend on certain items until the new government comes after the general elections in April-May. With the presentation of the interim budget on February 1, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will surpass former finance ministers like Manmohan Singh, Arun Jaitley, P Chidambaram and Yashwant Sinha. These leaders had presented five consecutive budgets.
Sitharaman is the second woman to present the budget after Indira Gandhi
After the Modi government assumed power in 2014, the responsibility of the Finance Ministry was handed over to veteran BJP leader Arun Jaitley. He presented budgets five times consecutively from 2014-15 to 2018-19. Due to Jaitley’s ill health, additional charge of the Finance Ministry was given to Piyush Goyal ahead of the 2019 general elections. He presented the interim budget on February 1, 2019.
After the 2019 general elections, the responsibility of the Finance Department in the Modi 2.0 government was handed over to Nirmala Sitharaman. After that she has presented five consecutive market budgets. With this, she also became the second woman after Indira Gandhi to present the budget. Indira Gandhi presented the budget for the financial year 1970-71.
