Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will make many records by presenting the budget for the sixth consecutive time.
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New Delhi. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the sixth consecutive budget on February 1. Along with this, he will have many records in his name. She will equal the record held by former Prime Minister Morarji Desai of presenting five consecutive full budgets and one interim budget. Also, Sitharaman is the first full-time woman finance minister, who has presented five full budgets since July 2019 and will present the Vote on Account i.e. interim budget next week. When Sitharaman presents the interim budget on February 1, she will leave behind the records of former finance ministers like Manmohan Singh, Arun Jaitley, P Chidambaram and Yashwant Sinha. These leaders had presented five consecutive budgets.
As Finance Minister, Desai presented five annual budgets and one interim budget between 1959–1964. The interim budget for the financial year 2024-25 to be presented on February 1 will be voted on account. This will give the government the right to spend on certain items until the new government comes after the general elections in April-May. Since general elections are about to be held, Sitharaman is unlikely to make any major policy changes in her interim budget. At an event last month, the Finance Minister had denied any ‘major announcement’ in the interim budget. He said that this would be just a vote on account before the general elections. Once passed in Parliament, the Vote on Account will allow the government to withdraw funds from the country’s Consolidated Fund to meet the expenditure for the April-July period.
After the general elections, the new government is likely to be formed around June. In such a situation, the new government will bring the full budget for 2024-25 in July. Generally, the interim budget does not contain major policy announcements, but there is no bar on the government from taking such steps as are necessary to deal with the issues facing the economy. After the Modi government came to power in 2014, Arun Jaitley took charge of the Finance Ministry and presented five consecutive budgets from 2014–15 to 2018–19. In the year 2017, the government decided to present the budget on a date instead of the last working day of February. With this, the colonial era tradition of presenting the budget on 28 February was ended.
Piyush Goyal, who was holding additional charge of the ministry due to Jaitley’s ill health, presented the interim budget on February 1, 2019. Goyal had increased the standard deduction for salaried taxpayers from Rs 10,000 to Rs 50,000. Also, the tax exemption for taxpayers whose annual taxable income does not exceed Rs five lakh was increased from Rs 2,500 to Rs 12,500. Modi government handed over the responsibility of Finance Department to Sitharaman in its second term after the 2019 general elections. She became the second woman after Indira Gandhi to present the budget.
Indira Gandhi presented the budget for the financial year 1970-71. That year, Sitharaman did away with the traditional ‘briefcase’ used for budget documents and replaced it with a ‘bahi-khata’ bearing the national emblem. India is moving forward with the aim of becoming a $5 trillion economy by 2027-28 and a $30 trillion economy by 2047. Former Prime Minister Morarji Desai presented the budget maximum 10 times. This is the highest budget presented by any Finance Minister. He had presented budgets six times consecutively, including the interim budget. The first budget of independent India was presented by the first Finance Minister, RK Shanmukham Chetty. Sitharaman, who is presenting her sixth budget, may take some measures to promote the rural sector. One of the main reasons for this is that the growth rate of the agricultural sector is expected to decline from four percent to 1.8 percent in the financial year 2023-24.
Disclaimer: IndiaTheNews has not edited this news. This news has been published from PTI-language feed.
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