The financial year 2025-26 Union Budget will be presented in Parliament on February 1. This is going to be the second Budget of the BJP-led NDA government after it won re-elections for a third term in 2024.
The Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, will present the Union Budget, who, in her six years of tenure as the Finance Minister, has so far presented seven Budgets. She will be presenting her sixth consecutive Union Budget and the eighth Budget overall.
The previous record for successive Budgets was held by Arun Jaitley, who presented five successive ones from 2014-15 to 2018-19. After Jaitley’s tenure, Piyush Goyal presented the interim Budget for 2019-20 on February 1, 2019, before Nirmala Sitharaman took over.
India’s fourth Prime Minister from 1977 to 1979, Morarji Desai once had the record of Budgets presented as Finance Minister-a feat surpassed recently. Between 1959 and 1964, Desai presented five annual Budgets, with another one interim Budget. In 1962 and 1967 he presented two more interim Budgets. More than half a century passed before his feat was surpassed in 2024 by Nirmala Sitharaman.
The Budget, in fact, has been presented on February 1 every year since 2017, to give enough time for the effective implementation of policies and programmes before the new financial year begins on April 1.
This year, though the Budget presentation falls on a Saturday, the stock market will remain open. The entire Budget presentation exercise will be telecast live by several channels and web portals.
