Who delivered the longest Budget speech in India?

Longest Budget speech in India: On 31 May 2019, Nirmala Sitharaman became the Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister of India. With her appointment, she became India's first full-time female Finance Minister. 

On 5 July 2019, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman became the second woman to have presented the Union Budget of India after former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who presented the Budget 1970-71. 

During her maiden Budget speech in 2019, FM Nirmala Sitharaman made a record Budget speech of 2 hours and 17 minutes. With this, she broke former Finance Minister Jaswant Singh's record. 

The same year, FM Sitharaman drew the country's attention as she replaced the standard Budget briefcase with the traditional 'Bahi Khata'. It was a kind of ledger wrapped in a red cloured cloth with a National Emblem on it. 

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In 2020, she broke her previous record and delivered the longest Budget speech in India's history. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's second Budget speech was 2 hours and 42 minutes long. 

FM Sitharaman felt uneasy towards the end of her Budget speech and the rest of her speech was delivered by the Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla.

In 2021, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented India's first paperless Budget owing to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This was her first Digital Budget. 

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has presented her fourth Budget 2022-23 on February 1, 2022. 

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While Nirmala Sitharaman holds the record of delivering the longest Budget speech in India's history in 2020, her speech is ranked third in terms of the number of words. 

In terms of the number of words, Dr. Manmohan Singh's 1991 Budget speech is the longest in India's history-- 18,650 words. The speech is among the most important Budgets of independent India and was delivered by him during his tenure as Finance Minister of India. 

Former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's 2018 Budget speech is the second-longest in terms of the number of words-- 18,604. 

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