When Nirmala Sitharaman rises today in Parliament to present the Union budget by 2025-26, not only will the Government’s fiscal roadmap premiere, which will make history. This marks its eighth consecutive budget presentation, overcoming all the predecessors of India’s history for the terraced budget. The time is also a testament to his term as a full -time Prime Minister of Finance, a role he played in 2019 after Prime Minister Narendra Modi won his second term.

With this budget, the first of the Modi 3.0 government, Sitharaman is closer to the record of ten union budgets of the former Prime Minister Merarji Desai. The record record was established in two separate tinencies, with six budgets presented between 1959 and 1964 during his time as Minister of Finance, and four more from 1967 to 1969. Sitharaman, however, is writing his legacy through D ‘An uninterrupted streak since 2019, including the interim budget of February 2024.

It is now next to a distinguished finance league that have shaped the fiscal landscape of India over the decades. P. Chidambaram delivered nine budgets during its multiple terms, while Pranab Mukherjee presented eight. Manmohan Singh, during his transformative term as Minister of Finance in the early 1990’s, presented five budgets that played a key role in the liberalization of the Indian economy.

Apart from the configuration of records for the number of consecutive budgets, Sitharaman also maintains another unique distinction: the longest budget speech in India’s history. In 2020, he spoke for two hours and forty minutes before his health worry pushed him to cut off the speech, leaving two pages without reading. This suddenly contrasts with the shortest budget speech given in 1977 by Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel, who ended the provisional budget in only 800 words.

The evolution of the union budget presentation reflects the changing dynamics of Indian governance. Until 1999, the budgets were traditionally presented at 5pm: a colonial hangover designed to coincide with the commercial schedule in London.

This practice was abandoned by the then Minister of Finance, Yashwant Sinha, who moved the budget presentation at 11 am during the Government Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Another significant reform took place in 2017 when the date of the budget submission was advanced from the last day of February to February 1. This change said that the parliamentary approval process could be completed by the end of March, allowing perfect implementation since April 1, the start of the new fiscal exercise.