Shortest & Longest Budget Speeches: Where Does Nirmala Sitharaman Stand?

New Delhi: How long do Union Budget speeches last?

Over the years, it has been seen that the average duration of a budget speech is 90 to 120 minutes.

As for Nirmala Sitharaman, she holds a unique record. The Union Finance minister delivered the longest ever speech, lasting 2 hours and 42 minutes, while presenting the Budget for the 2020-21 financial year. In fact, it would have been an even longer speech if it was not cut short due to health concerns as there were two pages still to be read!

That surpassed her own record of 2 hours and 17 minutes that she took to deliver the speech while presenting the first of her four Budgets, in 2019 for FY 2019-20.

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By her standards, Sitharaman’s Union Budget speech on Tuesday was short. She spoke for an hour and a half, making it her shortest in four years.

Last year, her budget speech ran for 100 minutes.

Before Sitharaman, it was Jaswant Singh who held the record for longest Budget speech – 2 hours and 15 minutes in 2003, India Today reported.

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The Finance minister who delivered the shortest Budget speech in the history of Independent India was Hirubhai M Patel, in 1977. His Interim Budget address was of only 800 words.

Dr Manmohan Singh delivered the longest Budget speech in terms of words – 18,650 — in 1991.