Union Budget speeches get longer as India grows older; will Arun Jaitley break the record?

Union Budget speeches in India have always been a keenly-heard and watched event by corporates, individuals and the media fraternity.

Noticeably, Finance Ministers are seen giving longer speeches as independent India grows older with increasing announcements of Union Budgets over the years.

The incumbent FM Arun Jaitley has emerged as the Union finance minister with the second-longest budget speeches on average.

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His first Budget speech, presented in 2014, was by far the longest Budget speech ever with 253 paragraphs and it went on for 2 hours and 10 minutes, which is excluding a four-minute break that he took for his health reasons.

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Although the longest time taken to give the Budget speech goes to his counterpart in 2003, Jaswant Singh, who was also elected from the Bharatiya Janata Party as a part of the ruling NDA or the National Democratic Alliance.

Interestingly, the first budget speech in independent India was only 39 paragraphs long.

So far, the record for the longest Budget speech-is held by an NDA FM, Jaswant Singh, who clocked 2 hours, 13 minutes in 2003, according to Indpaedia.com, a volunteer based archival portal.

At 190, Jaitley’s speeches have so far had the highest average number of paragraphs, except one, than all the previous finance ministers』 speeches.

Former Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who was also India’s President later, had an average of 202 paragraphs for his budget speeches. Pranab Mukherjee’s average jumped because of the 220 paragraphs seen in 2012, which was also his last budget speech.

Mukherjee is also second at 8, after Morarji R. Desai (10), in terms of the highest number of Budgets presented by any Finance Minister.

P. Chidambaram is the third on the list with an average of 173 paragraphs. Other finance ministers among the top 10 presenting with longer paragraphs include Yashwant Sinha (170), Manmohan Singh (133), R.Venkataraman (132), Haribhai M. Patel (117), Yashwantrao B. Chavan (88), T.T.Krishnamachari (78) and Morarji R. Desai (77).

Incidentally, Mukherjee had presented the 1982 budget presentation that had lasted 95 minutes. This prompted former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to say 'the shortest finance minister has delivered the longest budget speech'.

On Thursday February 1, being the last full-time Budget speech for the 5-year term of the NDA, Jaitley has at least one more speech left to break the record.

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