The government led by Prime Minister Modi will present the Central Budget in Parliament for the third time on the 23rd. Since 1860, 77 complete financial statements and 15 interim financial statements have been tabled in the Parliament of India. Check out a news package on India’s budget history.
How much revenue does the Indian government get? How much money will be spent on which sectors over a period of time in the coming years? A financial report called a budget is a report that evaluates this in advance.
The Central Financial Statement is presented by the Government of India under Article 112 of the Constitution of India.
The word for ‘small bag’ is the French ‘bouquet’. This is where the word ‘budget’ comes from.
During the British rule, the first budget of slave India was presented before the country became independent. On 18 February 1860, the first budget of India was presented by James Wilson, a Scotsman who was the Finance Member of the Executive Council of the Viceroy of India.
The first budget of independent India was presented on November 26, 1947 by the then Central Finance Minister RK Shanmugam Chettiar.
It is noteworthy that Shanmugam Chettiar, born in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, was the finance minister in Nehru’s cabinet for only one year.
India’s first budget was an interim budget of only seven months. Shanmugam Chettiar coined the term “Interim Budget”. Later, during Lok Sabha election years, interim budgeting became a common practice in India.
India’s first budget paved the way for the country’s economic future.
Nowadays, the budget is presented at 11 am. But the first budget of independent India was presented at 5 p.m.
Shanmugam Chettiar successfully presented the first budget at a time when the country was burning with various protests and riots due to partition.
In particular, the budget decided that India and Pakistan would have a single currency until September 1948.
In India’s first budget, out of a total expenditure of Rs 197.39 crore, the country’s military sector was allocated Rs 92.74 crore for defence.
Indian Prime Ministers have also presented the budget in Parliament in the past. The then Prime Minister Nehru in 1958, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1970, the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1987 and the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have presented the budget.
Indira Gandhi was the first woman Prime Minister to present the budget in independent India. When he was the Prime Minister, he looked after the finance sector.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the budget on 5th July 2019. With this, Central Minister Nirmala Sitharaman became the first full-time woman Finance Minister to present the Budget in India.
Former Prime Minister Morarji Desai is the only person in Indian history to present ten Central Budgets. After him, former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has presented nine budgets.
2,000, the budget was tabled on the last working day of February at 5 p.m.
Later, in the same year, former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha changed the timing of budget presentations to 11 am as soon as they started. This continues to this day.
Arun Jaitley, who was the former finance minister in 2014, read his budget speech for more than two and a half hours. It is said to be the longest budget speech ever read.
Till 2017, two different budgets were presented in India. One is the general budget. Another railway budget. The general budget was presented by the finance minister and the railway budget by the railway minister.
In 2017, Prime Minister Modi created the practice of Integrated Budgeting. Arun Jaitley is the first finance minister to present a consolidated single budget of the country.
Until 1950, budget documents were printed in the President’s House. Later, the budget documents were printed at a press at Minto Road in Delhi. In 1980, a printing press was set up in the Central Finance Ministry. Till date the budget documents are printed at the press in the Ministry of Finance.
In 2019, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman introduced the custom of carrying the budget document in a bag with the national emblem wrapped in a tapestry, putting an end to the traditional red briefcase method of carrying budget documents.
Subsequently, in 2021, Central Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented a paperless budget for the first time in India’s budget history. Then he read his digital ‘budget’ without documents from the ‘Made in India’ tablet.
With such a long history, the budget of the central government has expectations from different sections. What are the taxes for whom?, what are the privileges? What are the new plans? What are the new announcements? Interest is the reason for people’s expectations about the budget.
