Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
Credit: PTI Photo
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will be presenting the Interim Budget for the fiscal year 2024-25 on February 1. This will be the last Budget of the Narendra Modi government before the country heads to Lok Sabha elections.
The Budget speech is one of the Parliament's biggest highlights of the year, and in this context here we have a look at who presented the longest Budget ever.
Current Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman herself holds the record for delivering the longest Budget speech.
During the 2020 Union Budget on February 1, her presentation commenced at 11 am and extended until 1:40 pm, which means she spoke for two hours and 42 minutes.
She had to cut short her speech due to health concerns with only two pages remaining. The rest of the Budget was read out by Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla.
In her first Budget speech for the year 2019-2020, Sitharaman spoke for two hours and 17 minutes.
In the year 2022, Sitharaman spoke for a total of one and a half hours only, which makes it her shortest-ever Budget speech.
However, the record for the most words in a Budget speech was by Manmohan Singh, who delivered a 18,650-words speech in 1991 when he was the Finance Minister of the Narasimha Rao government. It was in this speech that he announced measures for the liberalisation of Indian economy.
In 2018, then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's speech comprised 18,604 words.
Notably, the shortest Budget speech was in 1977 by then Finance Minister Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel, whose speech had only 800 words.