Union Budget 2026: Longest and shortest Budget speeches in Indian history

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the Union Budget on February 1, the date landing on a Sunday for the first time in history.

In light of the upcoming Budget, let us take a look at longest and shortest Budget speeches in history.

Nirmala Sitharaman

The longest budget speech to be ever presented was by the current Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

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, a total of 2 hours and 42 minutes.

The speech was so lengthy that towards the end of her speech, with two pages left, the Finance Minister felt unwell, and the rest of the speech was given by Om Birla, the Lok Sabha Speaker.

With this speech, Nirmala Sitharaman broke her 2019 record of having delivered the longest budget speech in India.

Her 2025 speech lasted 1 hour and 14 minutes.

Jaswant Singh

Before this, the longest Budget speech by any Indian Finance Minister was by Former Finance Minister Jaswant Singh who delivered one of the longest budget speeches in 2003. Singh's speech lasted 2 hours and 13 minutes, making it the third longest budget speech ever.

Arun Jaitley

The next longest budget speech was delivered by Arun Jaitley when he was the Finance Minister in 2014, when he spoke for 2 hours and 10 minutes.

Shortest speech:

The shortest Budget presentation in the Indian history was by Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel, who was finance minister in Morarji Desai’s cabinet in 1977. The speech was just 800 words long.

Patel reportedly had kept his speech short since the previous government had done the calculations which left him with very limited time until March 31, 1977, to fulfil constitutional requirements with a Vote on Account.