India's First Budget

Here we take you through the days when it was first presented in Free India and the changes it had gone through till the latest much hyped one by our Current finance minister Mr. Arun Jaitley -

• It was on 7th April, 1860, India’s first budget was presented by James Wilson of East India Company to the British Crown

•  Independent India’s first budget was presented by India’s first Finance Minister R.K. Shanmukham Chetty, 5 pm on 26th November, 1947 and spanned only 7.5 months from August 15, 1947 to March 31, 1948.

•  The day of Budget presentation is always determined by the President; and the whole speech is divided in 2 sections: Part A deals with General Economic Survey and Part B deals with Taxation issues. And, The Government account is categorized into Consolidated Fund of India, Contingency Fund of India and Public Account

•  Until 2000, the norm was to present Budget at 5 PM on the last working day of February, which was changed for the first time by Yashwant Sinha when he started presentation at 11.00 AM during 2001 Budget.

• Morarji Desai is credited with presenting maximum number of budgets in India: 10;. And the finance ministers to have presented 7 budgets are: Pranab Mukherjee, P Chidambaram, Yashwant Sinha, Y B Chavan and C D Deshmukh

•  Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi are the only Prime Ministers who have also presented Budget inside the Parliament

•  In 1982, when Pranab Mukherjee delivered the budget presentation using 1 hour and 35 minutes, it actually started a trend of delivering long speeches. Indira Gandhi had said after that speech, “the shortest finance minister has delivered the longest budget speech.” In 2003, Jaswant Singh broke that record by using 2 hours to finish his budget presentation. 

•  The budget presented by Manmohan Singh in 1992-93 is often hailed as the most important budget of India ever created. He reduced import duty from 300% to 50%, which liberalized Indian economy, and the modern IT industry owes much of its presence to that decision.