Budget 2022: Nirmala Sitharaman makes her shortest Budget speech in 4 years

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made her shortest Budget speech in Parliament on Tuesday. Sitharaman started the speech at 11:00 am and concluded at 12:30 pm. The speech ran for 90 minutes, which is the shortest during her tenure as the Finance Minister of the country. 

This year's Budget speech was nearly half the length of last year's speech which ran for 162 minutes, which also holds the record for the longest Budget speech ever. During the course of this speech, she broke her own record of July 2019 - her maiden Budget - when she had spoken for 2 hours and 17 minutes.

Mahindra and Mahindra chairman Anand Mahindra commented on the length of the FM's speech on Twitter. "Brevity has always been a virtue. @nsitharaman 's shortest budget address may prove to be the most impactful…,:" said Mahindra. 

Sitharaman read out the Budget 2022 speech in the Parliament through a tab instead of the 'bahi-khata' which was first used in 2019. Last year too, Sitharaman had read out the Budget from a tab. This was the first time that the Union Budget was presented in a paperless form. 

The tab had been placed inside a red cover with emblem Ashok Stambh embossed on it in golden, bearing a semblance with 'bahi Khata'. The same cover was used this year, as well. 

In terms of word spoken, Manmohan Singh delivered the longest Budget speech in 1991 under the P.V. Narasimha Rao government. The speech had 18,650 words. 

In 2018, then FM Arun Jaitley's speech with 18,604 words was the second-longest in terms of word count. Jaitley spoke for 1 hour and 49 minutes.

The shortest Budget speech in history was made by then finance minister Hirubhai Mulljibhai Patel in 1977. The speech only had 800 words in it. 

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