10 Interesting Facts About The Union Budget

The Union Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, is going to present the Interim Budget for the fiscal year 2024-25 on February 1. This will be held ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in the upcoming months. With the presentation of the Interim Budget, there will be a brief budget session held in the Parliament between January 31 to February 9. With two days left until the announcement of the budget, let’s take a look at some of the interesting and unknown facts about India’s Union Budget.

10 Interesting Facts about India’s Union Budget:

• The first budget of India was presented around 160 years ago on April 7, 1860. It was East India Company’s James Wilson who presented the first budget to the British Crown then.
• The first Union Budget of independent India was presented by RK Shanmukham Chetty on November 26, 1947.
• Morarji Desai presented a total of 10 budgets, which marks to be the most offered by a single person.
• Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi are the only Prime Ministers who have presented the budget.
• Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the one who gave the longest budget speech (in terms of number of words) in 1991 during his tenure as the Finance Minister.
• As a ritual, the Halwa Ceremony is followed by a lock-in step conducted to maintain confidentiality around the budget preparation.
• Till 2016, the Union Budget was presented on the last working day of February, which was then changed by the Former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in 2017.
• Later in 2017, it was the first time when the Railway Budget was merged with the Union Budget.
• Present Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is the one who has given the longest budget speech so far. She spoke for 2.42 hours while presenting the Union Budget in 2020.
• On February 1, 2021, the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the first paperless budget.