Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is all set to present the Union Budget 2022-23 in parliament on February 1. She will begin to deliver her fourth Budget speech at 11 am.
You can watch Sitharaman's Budget 2022 speech on Sansad TV - the official parliament channel and national broadcaster Doordarshan. You can also watch it on YouTube channel of Sansad TV.
While budget speeches generally last for close to the two hours, Sitharaman is known to deliver lengthy ones. For her budget announcement for 2020, she spoke for two hours and 40 minutes. She had begun the speech at 11 am and even with two pages of the Budget yet to be read, she ended it around 1:40 pm.
The minister had broken her 2019 record of the longest Budget speech made in India.
Read: Nirmala Sitharaman and a short history of lengthy Union Budget speeches
In 2019, Sitharaman had delivered a marathon Union Budget speech that went on for two hours and 17 minutes. Peppered with Hindi, Tamil and Urdu couplets, she went past former finance minister Jaswant Singh's record of two hours and 15 minutes in 2003.
During the Budget announcement in 2021, Nirmala Sitharaman wrapped up her 10,500-words speech in one hour and 40 minutes. The country’s first woman Finance Minister’s third Union Budget announcement was also her shortest.
When it came to the number of words, it Manmohan Singh, then finance minister in the Narasimha Rao government, topped the list. His 1991 Budget speech had 18,650 words, while that of Sitharaman in 2020 had 13,275 words.
The shortest Union Budget speech ever made in India was delivered by former Finance Minister Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel in 1977. It was an interim Budget and consisted of just 800 words.
