Mukherjee's Budget speech to be 80th in India's history

It will be the 80th Budget speech presentation in the history of independent India, when Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee tomorrow reads out his taxation and other economic policies before Parliament.

Parliament has so far hosted 79 Budget speeches, including interim and special situation budgetary proposals, ever since the country's first Union Budget presented by then Finance Minister R K Shanmukham Chetty on November 26, 1947.

For individual records, Mukherjee would present the Budget for sixth time in history, thus becoming the Finance Minister to have made third highest number of Budget speeches.

The maximum number of 10 Budgets have been presented by Morarji Desai, while P Chidambaram, Yashwant Sinha, Y B Chavan and C D Deshmukh have presented seven Budgets each.

Mukherjee would tomorrow join the league of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the country's fourth Finance Minister T T Krishnamachari, who have presented six speeches each during their tenures in the Finance Ministry.

So far, Mukherjee have presented four annual Budgets, including the one for the current fiscal 2010-11, and one interim Budget for the fiscal 2009-10.

Among others, R Venkatraman and H M Patel have presented three Budgets each, while Jaswant Singh, V P Singh, C Subramaniam, John Mathai and R K Shanmukham Chetty have two Budgets each to their credits.

Besides, Jawahar Lal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Charan Singh, N D Tiwari, Madhu Dandwate, S B Chavan and Sachindra Chaurdhuri have presented one Budget each.

The Budget was presented by Nehru, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi in their capacity as Prime Minister and Minister of Finance.

Charan Singh (once) and Morarji Desai (on four occasions) presented Budget as Deputy PM and Minister of Finance.

So far, a total of 12 interim Budgets and four special-occasion budgetary proposals, also known as mini-budgets, have been presented before Parliamant, while the remaining 64 have been normal annual Budgets.

The first such mini-budget was presented by T T Krishnamachari on November 30,1956 in form of fresh taxation proposals through Finance Bills, demanded by the prevailing domestic and international economic situation.

The step was also required to tackle issues like rising inflation and dwindling forex reserves at that time.

The second mid-year Budget taxation proposals were also presented by Krishnamachari in August 1965, while the third mini-budget was presented by Y B Chavan in December 1971 wherein he proposed additional measures for mobilisation of resources for defence requirements.

The last mini-budget proposals in the Parliament was also made by Chavan in July 1974, wherein he made fresh taxation proposals to tackle inflation-related issues after only five months of the regular annual Budget.