Budget 2024: Nirmala Sitharaman set to surpass Morarji Desai’s record for most budget presentations

PTC News Desk: On Tuesday, when Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presents her seventh budget to Parliament, she will break the record held by former Finance Minister Morarji Desai, who only presented six budgets. Under Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, Desai served as Minister of Finance. In 1977, he was elected Prime Minister of India.

On November 26, 1947, RK Shanmugam Chetty, who was the finance minister at the time, presented the first budget of independent India, which totaled Rs 197.1 crore. In the most recent fiscal year, it increased to Rs 47.65 lakh crore.

Previously, the budget was to be presented at 5 p.m. But in 1999, then-finance minister Yashwant Sinha chose to introduce the budget at 11 a.m., a time that has been maintained to this day.

There have been occasions when the general budget was delivered by the prime minister rather than the finance minister, according to data kept by the Lok Sabha secretariat.

According to a Lok Sabha document, “Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, presented the budget for the financial year 1958–59 while acting as Prime Minister and temporarily handling the finance portfolio.” When finance minister Morarji Desai resigned, Indira Gandhi took over as prime minister and presented the budget for the fiscal year 1969–1970.

According to the paper, “the budget for that year was presented by his colleague minister Piyush Goyal due to the ill health of the then finance minister Arun Jaitley” in 2019.

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The sole ministry having a separate budget was the Railways department, which was combined with the general budget in 2017. The finance minister presents the budget to the Lok Sabha and then tables the budget papers in the Rajya Sabha, despite the fact that the Upper House lacks the authority to approve or disapprove the budget.

Debates on demand grants or ministry-specific funding come after the budgetary deliberations. Following the Demand for Grants conversations, all of these demands are combined and put through a Guillotine procedure.

The Rajya Sabha lacks the authority to accept or reject the budget, as was previously stated. The House refers the budget to the Lok Sabha following the Upper House’s discussion of it.

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