Union Budget 2023 | Who gave the longest Budget speech?

While Nirmala Sitharaman's 2020 speech was the longest in duration, it stands third in terms of the number of words

The Union Budget 2023-2024 is set to be presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on February 1, who already has the record for delivering the longest Budget speech.

The 2020 Union Budget presented by Sitharaman is the longest Budget speech in India's history. Her second Budget speech after acquiring the post, presented on February 1, 2020, started at 11 am and went on till 1:40 pm, approximately 160 minutes.

Towards the end of her speech, with two pages left, she felt rather uneasy, and the rest of the speech was given by Om Birla, the Lok Sabha speaker.

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She even broke the record the previous year, during the first year of her tenure, surpassing Jaswant Singh's record in 2003, with a Budget speech that last 2 hours and 17 minutes.

As with her previous speech, Sitharaman decided to include poetry and quoted the renowned Kashmiri poet Pandit Dinanath Kaul Nadim.

While her speech was the longest in duration, it stands third in terms of the number of words. The 13,275-word speech still stays behind Arun Jaitley's 2018 Budget speech (18,604 words) and Dr Manmohan Singh's 1991 Budget (18,650 words), which is regarded as one of the most important Budgets of Independent India.