India Union Budget – Some Trivia
Indian Union Budget has a history of 161 years.
As per Wikipedia, in terms of figures in USD, the Indian Union Budget is amongst the top 10 largest budgets in the world.
The first Indian Union budget was presented in February 1860.
The first Union Budget of free India was presented by R K Shanmukham Chetty in November 1947.
Former Finance Minister Morarji Desai has presented 10 budgets and P Chidambaram 9 budgets. Pranab Mukherjee has presented the budget 8 times. These are the highest number of budgets presented by a single Finance Minister.
On 29th February 1964 and 29th February 1968 Morarji Desai became the only Finance Minister to present the budget on his birthday!
Indira Gandhi was the first women Finance Minister to present the budget in 1970.
The shortest budget ever presented was by Hirubhai M Patel in 1977. The budget speech comprised of 800 words.
The longest budget in Indian history, in terms of duration, was presented by Nirmala Sitharaman in February 2020.
The longest budget in terms of number of words was presented by Morarji Desai in 1991, it comprised of 18650 words and was a landmark budget.
The first budget presented by R K Shanmukham Chetty was only 39 paragraphs long. After that the budget speeches kept getting longer.
Until 2000 the Budget was presented in Parliament at 5 PM on the last working day of February. This practise was inherited from the colonial era. However in 2001, the Finance Minister changed the timings to 11 AM and since then the budget is being presented in the morning.
Until 2016 the budget was presented on the last working day of February. From 2017 onwards it is being presented on the first day of February. Since 2016 Railway budget which was being presented separately got merged with the Union budget.
It was the tradition until 2018, for the Finance Minister to carry the budget document in a brief case to the Parliament. This tradition was established by the first finance minister of independent India R K Shanmukham Chetty.
In 2019 Nirmala Sitharaman changed this tradition by carrying the budget in a booklet wrapped in a red cloth, called Bahi-Khata.
In 2021 the bahi-khata gave way to made-in-India tablet, in which Nirmala Sitharaman presented India’s first paperless budget.
Every year, ahead of the budget presentation, the halwa ceremony is conducted. As part of this ritual, which has been going on for several years now, halwa is prepared in a huge frying pan and served to all the staff in the finance ministry. Once the sweet dish is prepared and served to the working and support staff in the ministry, they are cut off from their families till the Finance Minister presents the Finance Bill in the parliament. The concerned staff are not allowed to contact anyone. All communication is cut off. The lock-in period is to ensure that secrecy of the budget preparation is maintained and no sensitive information is leaked.
Every year on the budget day the share market shows considerable movement. The budget is the most important financial event for a nation and the share market is without doubt the barometer of a nation’s economy. The budget gives direction to the finances of the nation for the forthcoming year. The finances of the nation are invariably tied with the finances of its constituents – the companies, organisations, individuals, their savings, taxes paid, borrowings, interest rates, expenditure in infrastructure, defense, education, etc.
After the presentation of the budget on 1 February 2021, the Indian equity markets gave their best performance on a budget day in over past twenty years.
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