Budget 2022 will be the government’s second paperless budget and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s fourth consecutive Budget. The budget has always been a fascinating topic due to the secret that is maintained throughout the lengthy process of producing it, as well as the fascinating trivia linked with it.
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- The inaugural Budget was submitted to the British Crown on April 7, 1860, by Scottish economist and politician James Wilson of the East India Company.
- On November 26, 1947, then-finance minister R K Shanmukham Chetty presented the first Budget of Independent India.
- Until 1955, the Union Budget was provided in English. The Congress-led administration, on the other hand, chose to print the Budget papers in both Hindi and English later on.
- Nirmala Sitharaman delivered the longest speech that set a record while presenting the Union Budget 2020-21 on February 1, 2020. She delivered the speech for 2 hours and 42 minutes.
- The longest speech, however, was not the Budget speech, which contained the most words. Manmohan Singh gave the longest Budget address in terms of words in 1991 under the Narasimha Rao government, with 18,650 words. Arun Jaitley, the finance minister, gave a speech in 2018 that contained 18,604 words.
- Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel, the then-finance minister, set the record for the shortest Budget speech in 1977. It was 800 words long.
- Did you know that the Union Budget was delivered at 5 p.m. on the final business day of February until 1999? It was a British-era custom that was kept until Yashwant Sinha, the then-finance minister, changed the time to 11 a.m.
- In 2017, Arun Jaitley began presenting the Union Budget on February 1 instead of the last working day of the month, as was the colonial norm.
- There was a 92-year-old tradition to present the railway budget and the Union Budget separately. In 2017, the Railway Budget was merged with the Union Budget and issued as a one document.
- Indira Gandhi was the first woman, who presented the budget for the fiscal year 1970-71 and now Sitharaman became the second woman from 2019 to present the budget.
- Sitharaman abolished the “colonial hangover” of carrying a briefcase by introducing a ‘bahi khata’ to transport Budget documents. The National Emblem was emblazoned on the ‘bahi khata.’ Since the Budget went paperless last year, there has been no ‘bahi khata’. However, the tablet on which Sitharaman read her Budget address was wrapped in a red bahi khata-style cover.
