PREVIOUS
✖
Significant of Union Budget 2026
February 4 , 2026
14 hrs 0 min
27
0
- Nirmala Sitharaman was in 2019 appointed as India's first full-time woman finance minister when Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a decisive second term.
- After Modi came back to power in 2024 for the third time, Nirmala Sitharaman continued to retain her finance portfolio.
- Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday (February 1, 2026) presented her record ninth consecutive Union Budget for April 2026 to March 2027 in the Lok Sabha.
- It was presented on Sunday, a first in independent India’s history.
- The finance minister also laid the 16th Finance Commission report for tax revenue devolution between the Centre and states for 2026-2031.
- With 9th Consecutive Budget, Nirmala Sitharaman Becomes Longest Serving Finance Minister.
- This will take Nirmala Sitharaman closer to the record of 10 budgets that were presented by former Prime Minister Morarji Desai over different time periods.
- Former prime minister Morarji Desai had presented the Union Budget on 10 occasions, while P Chidambaram presented the Budget nine times, but both are not for consecutive years.
- 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.
- The other longest-serving Finance Minister at a stretch was C D Deshmukh.
- He took charge of the Ministry on June 1, 1950, and remained in office for about six years and two months.
- Manmohan Singh, known for pushing economic liberalisation, was Finance Minister for about five years between June 21, 1990, and June 16, 1996.
- Later, as Prime Minister, Singh held the additional charge of the Finance portfolio for a brief period once in 2008 and again in 2012.
- The first Finance Minister of Independent India was R K Shanmukham Chetty.
- The first-ever Union Budget of independent India was presented on November 26, 1947.
- Yashwant Sinha, the Finance Minister of India in the NDA government led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, changed the longstanding tradition by announcing the 1999 Union Budget at 11 AM.
- The budget was previously presented at 5 PM, a colonial practice designed to align with British morning time.
- Nirmala Sitharaman holds the record for the longest budget speech when her presentation on February 1, 2020, lasted two hours and 40 minutes.
- Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel's interim Budget speech in 1977 is so far the shortest at just 800 words.
- The Budget presentation date was in 2017 changed to the 1st of February to allow the government to complete the Parliamentary approval process by March-end and allow implementation of the Budget from the start of the fiscal year on April 1.
- Presenting the Budget on February 28 meant that the implementation could not start before May/June, after accounting for 2-3 months of the parliamentary approval process.
Leave a Reply
Your Comment is awaiting moderation.