Change in date, time of Budget presentation: All you need to know

The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government will present its last budget in February before the general election to be held in March-April this year.

Union minister Piyush Goyal, who has been temporarily been given the charge of the finance ministry with Arun Jaitley in the US for medical treatment, will present the Bharatiya Janata Party government’s fifth budget before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Also read: Interim budget 2019: All you need to know

Here when the time, date and other features of the Union Budget changed:

* RK Shanmukham Chetty was the first finance minister who presented Independent India’s first Union Budget on November 26, 1947.

* Morarji Desai has presented the most number of Budgets at ten, followed by P Chidambaram’s nine and Pranab Mukherjee’s eight. Yashwant Sinha, Yashwantrao Chavan and CD Deshmukh have presented seven budgets each and Manmohan Singh and TT Krishnamachari six.

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* Indira Gandhi is the only woman finance minister of India. Gandhi, the then prime minister of India, took over the ministry of finance after Desai resigned as the finance minister in 1969.

* The Union Budget was announced at 5pm on the last working day of February until 1999, a practice inherited from the British era. The Budget presentation in the evening gave producers and the tax collecting agencies the night to work out the change in prices.

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* It was Yashwant Sinha, the then finance minister in the BJP-led NDA government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who changed the ritual in 1999 by announcing the Union Budget at 11am.

* Finance minister Arun Jaitley started presenting the Union Budget on February 1 in 2017, departing from the colonial-era tradition of using the last working day of that month.

* The rail budget merged with Union budget in 2017 after it was presented separately for 92 years.

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