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On Saturday, Sitharaman moved a step closer to the record of 10 budgets that were presented by former prime minister Morarji Desai over different time periods
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presents the Union Budget 2025-26 in the Lok Sabha. (PTI)
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman scripted history on Saturday as she presented her eighth consecutive budget with a speech totalling 74 minutes.
Sitharaman moved a step closer to the record of 10 budgets that were presented by former prime minister Morarji Desai over different time periods. Desai presented six budgets during his tenure as finance minister from 1959 to 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 maximum number of budgets consecutively under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
It was in 2019 that she was appointed as India’s first full-time woman finance minister when PM Modi won a decisive second term. After Modi came back to power in 2024 for the third time, Sitharaman continued to retain her finance portfolio.
Sitharaman 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 still remaining.
Close on her heels was former finance minister Jaswant Singh who delivered a budget speech that lasted 2 hours and 13 minutes in 2003. During his address, he covered crucial areas such as universal health insurance, e-filing of income tax returns, and reductions in excise and customs duties.
In the third spot is ex-finance minister Manmohan Singh, who set the record for the longest budget speech in terms of word count in 1991 — 18,700 words. He still holds the record. Arun Jaitley follows in the second place with a speech that contained 18,604 words.
In 2024, Sitharaman delivered her shortest speech, taking only 60 minutes to present the interim budget.
Meanwhile, Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel’s interim Budget speech in 1977 is so far the shortest at just 800 words.
