Budget 2020: Find out who gave the longest Budget speech so far

New Delhi, Feb 01: The Union Budget for 2020-21 will be presented on today, February 1. Over the years, the budget speeches by the finance ministers have assumed a lot of importance. As it would be quite interesting to see how long she will talk this time, let us have a look at the longest speech so far:

The first budget speech of independent India, presented by R. K. Shanmukham Chetty, was only 39 paragraphs long. After that, budget speeches kept getting longer.

Nirmala Sitharaman, 2020

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman broke her own recond by delivering the longest budget speeches comprising 18,650 words, peppered with Kashmiri couplets.

Nirmala Sitharaman, 2019
In the year 2019, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman delivered the longest budget speeches, peppered with Urdu, Hindi and Tamil couplets. Sitharaman's speech clocked 2 hours and 17 minutes. She beat former Finance Minister Jaswant Singh's speech by two minutes.

Arun Jaitley in his fifth budget speech in 2018 was about 109 minutes comprising 18,604 words. His budget speech in 2017 was 110 minutes long. His second budget speech in 2015 exceeded two hours.

Jaswant Singh, 2003
Jaswant Singh's budget speech clocked 2 hours and 13 minutes in the year 2003.

Arun Jaitley, 2014
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley hold the distinction for having the most number of paragraphs in his budget speech. In his first budget speech presented in 2014, Jaitley readout 253 paragraphs and his speech lasted 2 hours and 10 minutes which is excluding a four-minute break that he took for his health reasons.

Pranab Mukherjee
Pranab Mukherjee who was also India's President later, name comes after Arun Jaitley in terms of paragraphs and words. He had an average of 202 paragraphs for his budget speeches. His average jumped because of the 220 paragraphs seen in 2012, which was also his last budget speech. Mukherjee presented the budget eight times.

P Chidambaram
Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram is third on the list and has presented the budget a total of nine times. His speeches consisted of a total of 173 paragraphs on an average. Chidambaram also stands at the second spot after Morarji R. Desai in terms of the number of Budgets presented by any Finance Minister.

Manmohan Singh

Manmohan Singh's landmark 1991 Budget speech was the longest in terms of words at 18,650.