Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to present Union Budget today

Pic courtesy: ANI

Newly appointed Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will on Friday present the first budget of the second term of the Narendra Modi government.

It will also be the maiden budget for Sitharaman, who becomes the second woman finance minister after Indira Gandhi to do so in the history of independent India.

Sitharaman will present the full-year budget for the year ending March 2020.

The Budget speech will begin around 11:00 am today with Sitharaman beginning it with an address to the speaker of Lok Sabha. Usually, the duration of the presentation ranges from 90 to 120 minutes.

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The Finance Minister on Thursday tabled in Parliament the pre-Budget Economic Survey for 2018-19, which projected the state of the economy and outlined its challenges. The survey was released by Chief Economic Adviser Krishnamurthy Subramanian yesterday.

This will be the 89th Union budget, which is the financial statement of the government, detailing its revenue and expenditure in the past, as well as estimated spending and projections for the coming year.

Chief Economic Advisor Krishnamurthy Subramanian said that keeping the budget documents in a four fold red cloth instead of a briefcase is an Indian tradition. It symbolizes our departure from slavery of Western thought. He added that it is not a budget but a 'bahi khata'(ledger).

In view of the general elections 2019, the interim Budget for the current fiscal was presented by Finance Minister Piyush Goyal in February this year.

Taking forward the setting up of a separate ministry for fisheries (one of the promises made by Modi), the Budget will have schemes for ushering in a "blue revolution".

Till the year 2016, the Union Budget was presented on the last working day of February. Former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had changed the tradition in 2017 when the Union Budget was presented on February 1.

The Railway Budget will also be presented today along with the Union Budget. This practice was also begun in the year 2016, where the practice of presenting the rail budget separately was discarded.

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Edited by mid-day online desk with inputs from Agencies