11 Interesting Facts About Budget

Nirmala Sitharaman is all set to announce Union Budget 2022 on 1st February. Before the budget let me bring to you some interesting facts about budget-

1. The history of the budget dates back to pre pre-independence period. Yes, You read it right! The first budget was presented by James Wilson, an economist representing the East India Company, on 7 April, 1860.

2. Independent India’s first budget was presented by then Finance Minister RK Shanmukham Chetty on 26 November,1947.

3. Indira Gandhi was the first woman to present the budget. Nirmala Sitharaman is the first full time Woman Finance Minister to present the budget.

4. India is a Union of states. In any federation, there are two main entities, federal states, and the center. India has a stronger center with less strong federal states. The center is called a Union in our constitution, hence, the budget of the union is called the “Union budget”.

5. The tradition to bring a briefcase to the present budget started around 1860 when William Ewart Gladstone was the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Great Britain. He was notorious for presenting very long budget speeches which lasted 5 to 6 hours.Since such long budget speeches required lots of files & documents, he felt the need for a box to organize and carry them to the parliament (House of Commons). That is why a briefcase called the “Budget Box” was presented to him by the Queen for this purpose.In the year 2019, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman replaced the Budget briefcase with the traditional 'Bahi Khata' having the National Emblem.

6. Until the year 2000, budgets used to be presented in the evening at 5 p.m. However, from the year 2001 the budget has been presented at 11 a.m. This change in the time of presentation of the budget was made by Yeshwant Sinha.

7. Till date 73 Union budget, 14 Interim budget and 4 Special Budget has been presented.

8. Morarji Desai has presented 10 budgets which is the highest count followed by P Chidambaram's 9 and Pranab Mukherjee's 8. Yashwant Sinha, Yashwantrao Chavan and C.D. Deshmukh has presented 7 budgets each while Manmohan Singh and T.T. Krishnamachari have presented 6 budgets.

9. Until 1955, the budget was printed only in English. From the year 1955-56, the budget has been printed in both English and Hindi.

10. Sitharaman holds the record for delivering the longest speech when she spoke for 2 hours and 42 minutes while presenting the Union Budget 2020-21 on February 1, 2020. With two pages still remaining, she had to cut short her speech as she felt unwell. She asked the Speaker to consider the remaining part of the speech as read.

11. At 18,650 words, Manmohan Singh delivered the longest Budget speech in terms of words in 1991 under the Narasimha Rao government.In 2018, then finance minister Arun Jaitley's speech with 18,604 words was the second-longest in terms of word count. Jaitley spoke for 1 hour and 49 minutes.

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