FM Nirmala Sitharaman gears up to present her 8th consecutive union budget

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, set to make history with her eighth consecutive Union Budget, has worked tirelessly with key officials, including Finance Secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey, to prepare a budget of over Rs 50 trillion for FY26.

The Budget will have to address several challenges, including decelerating economic growth, falling value of Rupee against the US dollar and moderation in consumption demand. The economic growth is estimated to slow to a 4-year low of 6.4 per cent in FY25. This is the lowest growth since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic which hit the world in 2019.

Sitharaman, who had steered the Indian economy through many difficult phases, including once-in-a-century pandemic, is again confronted with economic deceleration, moderation in consumption, stagnant private investment, and an uncertain geopolitical situation.

On account of various factors, the rupee plunged to an all-time low of 86.7 per US dollar earlier this month.
The team, assisting the Finance Minister to frame Budget proposals for 2025-26, includes Revenue Secretary Pandey, Economic Affairs Secretary Ajay Seth, Expenditure Secretary Manoj Govil, Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) Secretary Arunish Chawla, Financial Services Secretary M Nagaraju, and Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran.

The uphill task before the Finance Minister and her team would be to bolster growth without sacrificing fiscal prudence.
The government is also expected to stick to the fiscal glide path of reducing the fiscal deficit to below 4.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in FY26 amidst various headwinds.

Finance Secretary and Revenue Secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey: The oldest hand at the finance ministry who has been involved with the Budget making process since October 2019 when he joined DIPAM as Secretary.

In September last year, Pandey, a 1987-batch IAS officer from Odisha cadre, was appointed the Finance Secretary.

The Finance Ministry has six departments -- Revenue, Economic Affairs, Expenditure, Financial Services, DIPAM and DPE -- and the senior most bureaucrat in the ministry is designated as the Finance Secretary.
He has been credited with divestment of Air India and PSU dividend policy among others during his tenure as DIPAM Secretary.

Before serving as Secretary in the DIPAM, Pandey held many significant positions in the Union government and the Odisha government, in addition to serving a stint in the Regional Office of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO).

Economic Affairs Secretary, Ajay Seth: The second oldest hand at the finance ministry who has in past handled four Budgets since 2021. The Budget division under his departments anchors the entire Budget making process.

The balance sheet matching between revenue and expenditure and borrowings are all matched by the Budget division under him.
Seth is credited with heading initiatives such as India's first sovereign green bond issuance, and the creation of the Infrastructure Finance Secretariat.

Ensuring that the economy stays on the fiscal glide path while charting out the new strategy of targeting the debt-to-GDP ratio will be some of the items that will be on top of Seth's agenda in the upcoming Budget.

Expenditure Secretary Manoj Govil: A 1991-batch IAS officer of Madhya Pradesh cadre, Govil took charge of the Expenditure department in August 2024.

This will be Govil's first stint in Union Budget making and he will have a tough task in giving projections for subsidy in the Budget at a time when rupee is weakening.
DIPAM and Department of Public Enterprises Secretary Arunish Chawla, a 1992-batch Bihar cadre IAS officer, took charge in DIPAM and DPE in December 2024.

Chawla would have his task cut out to drive privatisation of IDBI Bank, move forward with asset monetisation and streamline the functioning of public sector enterprise.

Chawla, a Master's and Doctorate in Economics from the London School of Economics, had served as Joint Secretary in the Department of Expenditure in 2014.

Financial Services Secretary M Nagaraju: A 1993-batch Tripura cadre IAS officer, Nagaraju will have to draw up the roadmap for reforms like FDI cap hike in the insurance sector, deal with rising cyber frauds and further improve the health of the banking sector.
This would be the first brush with Union Budget making as Nagaraju joined as the Financial Services Secretary only in August.

CEA V Anantha Nageswaran: He would be presenting his third Economic Survey a day in advance to Budget 2025-26.

Nageswaran was appointed CEA in January 2022 by the government. Nageswaran, an academic and former executive with Credit Suisse Group AG and Julius Baer Group, succeeded K V Subramanian.

The Economic Survey prepared by CEA is scheduled to be tabled in Parliament on January 31. The survey will give detailed analysis of the state of economy and some of his suggestions to make India Viksit Bharat by 2047.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on February 1 will present a record eighth consecutive budget that is expected to contain measures to shore up weakening economic growth and ease the burden on the middle class struggling with high prices and stagnant wage growth while being fiscally prudent.
 
This will take Sitharaman closer to the record of 10 budgets that were presented by former Prime Minister Morarji Desai over different time periods. Desai has presented a total of 6 budgets during his tenure as finance minister in 1959-1964, and 4 budgets between 1967-1969.
 
Former finance ministers P Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee had presented nine and eight budgets, respectively, under different Prime Ministers.
 
Sitharaman, however, will continue to hold the record of presenting the most budget in on trot - eight straight budgets under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
 
She was in 2019 appointed as India's first full-time woman finance minister when Prime Minister Modi won a decisive second term. After Modi came back to power in 2024 for the third time, Sitharaman continued to retain her finance portfolio.
 
So far, she has presented a total of seven straight budgets, including an interim one in February, 2024.
 
Here are some facts related to the Budget presentation in Independent India.
 
FIRST BUDGET: The first-ever Union Budget of independent India was presented on November 26, 1947, by the nation's first finance minister RK Shanmukham Chetty.
 
MOST NUMBER OF BUDGETS: Former Prime Minister Morarji Desai holds the record for presenting the most budgets. He has presented a total of 10 budgets during his tenure as finance minister under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and later under Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri.
 
He presented his first budget on February 28, 1959, and presented full budgets in the following two years before presenting an interim one in 1962. This was followed by two full budgets. After four years, he presented another interim budget in 1967, followed by three full budgets in 1967, 1968, and 1969, presenting a total of 10 budgets.
 
SECOND HIGHEST NUMBER OF BUDGETS: Former finance minister P Chidambaram presented the budget on nine occasions. He first presented the budget on March 19, 1996, during the United Front government led by Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda. He presented another budget under the same government the next year and returned to the hot seat when the Congress-led UPA came to power in 2009.
 
He presented five budgets between 2004 and 2008. After a stint as Union Home Minister, he was back in the finance ministry and presented budgets in 2013 and 2014.
 
THIRD HIGHEST NUMBER OF BUDGETS: Pranab Mukherjee presented eight budgets during his tenure as finance minister. He presented budgets in 1982, 1983 and 1984 and five straight ones between February 2009 and March 2012 in the Congress-led UPA government.
 
MANMOHAN SINGH: Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh presented five straight budgets between 1991 and 1995 when he was finance minister in the P V Narasimha Rao government.
 
LONGEST BUDGET SPEECH: Sitharaman holds the record for the longest budget speech when her presentation on February 1, 2020, lasted two hours and 40 minutes. At the time, she cut short her speech with two pages still remaining.
 
SHORTEST BUDGET SPEECH: Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel's interim Budget speech in 1977 is so far the shortest at just 800 words.
 
TIMING: The Budget was traditionally presented on the last day of February at 5 pm. The timing followed a colonial era practice when the announcements could be made in London and India at the same time. India is 4 hours and 30 minutes ahead of the British Summer Time, and so presenting the budget at 5 pm in India ensured that it was happening in the daytime in the United Kingdom.
 
The timing was changed in 1999 when the then finance minister Yashwant Sinha in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government presented the budget at 11 am. Since then budgets are presented at 11 am.
 
DATE: 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 on April 1.
 
Presenting the Budget on February 29 meant that the implementation could not start before May/June after accounting for 2-3 months of the parliamentary approval process.

(Except for the headline, nothing has been changed by Top Indian News in the PTI copy.)