Budget 2025: Nirmala Sitharaman’s Delivers 74-Minute Speech; Check Longest and Shortest Budget Announcements

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made history once again by delivering a 74-minute speech for the 2025 budget. This continues her streak of consecutive budget speeches, with her 2020 speech still holding the record for the longest at 2 hours and 40 minutes—though she had to cut it short with two pages left.

Former Finance Minister Jaswant Singh delivered a 2-hour and 13-minute speech in 2003, which included key reforms like universal health insurance and the introduction of e-filing for income tax returns. In terms of word count, the record is held by ex-Finance Minister and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose 1991 budget speech contained 18,700 words. 

Arun Jaitley follows closely with 18,604 words. While Sitharaman's 2024 budget was her shortest at just 60 minutes, the record for the shortest interim budget speech goes to Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel, who spoke for only 800 words in 1977.
Sitharaman also moved a step closer to the record of 10 budgets that were presented by former prime minister Morarji Desai over different time periods.

Desai presented six budgets during his tenure as finance minister from 1959 to 1964, and four budgets between 1967 and 1969.Former finance ministers P Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee had presented nine and eight budgets, respectively, under different prime ministers.It was in 2019 that she was appointed as India’s first full-time woman finance minister when PM Modi won a decisive second term. After Modi came back to power in 2024 for the third time, Sitharaman continued to retain her finance portfolio.