The new Monsoon Budget parliamentary Session is scheduled to begin on the 22nd of July. The session will adjourn on the 12th of August. The running Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is slated to present the budget on July 23rd at 11:00 am.
Against this backdrop, let's take a detailed look at the historic budget speeches made post-independence in India. We will revisit the longest and shortest speeches made in India's budget history and go through the agendas set over the years.
To begin with Manmohan Singh, who was the Finance Minister of the country till 1996, in his famous 1991 budget speech, introduced radical reforms that would forever alter the face of the country and the economy. In his legendary speech, Manmohan Singh quoted Victor Hugo, mentioning how it was high time that India took an elevated seat at the global table. Singh’s speech was a response to the immediate repercussions of one of the worst economic predicaments that the country witnessed. Singh’s reforms in the budget were a feedback to the dreadful state of affairs that India was going through back then.
The then Finance Minister’s choice of words to emanate the country’s intentions at that juncture would be as crucial as the actions he implemented. In the speech he would continue to say,“... As Victor Hugo once said, ‘no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come’," said Singh in his maiden budget speech. “I suggest to this august House that the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea. Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now wide awake. We shall prevail. We shall overcome."
The message was delivered clearly to the nation. The inflow of foreign investments that followed, till now has grown to be only stronger and powerful. These investments ensured that India did not face yet another economic crisis like it did in 1991. Although there was a crisis of mini-balance of payments in 2013, the country did not face the consequences at a scale which had affected the nation nearly three decades ago.
Since that time, excluding the interim budgets, 28 budgets have been presented by six finance ministers namely: Manmohan Singh (1991-1996); Yashwant Sinha (1998-2003); Jaswant Singh (2003-2004); P. Chidambaram (1996-1998, 2004-2009, 2013-2014), Pranab Mukherjee
(2009-2013); and Arun Jaitley (2014-2019).
Among the speeches made by the mentioned Finance Ministers, Manmohan Singh’s was the longest at 18,364 words. The only Finance Minister who touched close to his record is Arun Jaitley with 16,552 words.
Post-1990, budgets have an average word count of 13,600. In the post-liberalization era, Yashwant Sinha made the longest speech (14,895) on average, surpassing Manmohan Singh who had an average of 14,086 words.
P. Chidambaram on the other hand, delivered comparatively smaller budget speeches, roughly around 12,830 words. Having delivered eight budgets, Mr Chidambaram holds the record for the second-highest number of budget speeches made by an Indian Finance Minister, following Morarji Desai, who had delivered ten.
On February 1, 2020, Nirmala Sitharaman held the record for the longest budget speech ever made in the country, spanning 2 hours and 40 minutes. However, when it comes to word count, Manmohan Singh remains the one to deliver the longest speech.
FM Nirmala Sitharaman had to cut short her speech, with two pages remaining to be read. In the 2020 budget, Nirmala Sitharaman ushered in new Income tax slabs and LIC IPO.
The shortest budget speech was delivered by Hirubhai Mulljiubhai Patel in the 1977 interim budget with a word count of only 800.
India’s history had witnessed budget speeches delivered by men only- a record which would be thrashed by Nirmala Sithraman’s first speech on July 5, 2019.
Among the speeches delivered, there was seldom any mention of issues related to women or gender. References to middle-class and urban issues were also rarely made in the speeches. Arun Jaitley was the only one FM back then, who added references to these issues in his budget speech (per 10,000 words).
When Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister, he spoke the most on markets and related terms like private sectors. However, the ensuing budgets saw a considerable decline in market-related terms.
Since Manmohan Singh’s time, references to the state have increased. Even Jaitley used to refer to the state, and state-related terms like the government more frequently. The recurrence in the reference to investment, and related terms like foreign direct investments and capital, also saw a decline since Singh’s time. Although the mention of industries had dwindled, references to services and related terms were made, which indicated a shift in the economic sector composition.
