Union Budget 2020

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is set to present the Budget 2020 on February 1. The Union Budget is an estimate of income and expenditure of the government for a set period of time. It is an annual financial report of India. The Budget also documents how much money the Centre could expect to raise in the coming fiscal and how and where it would spend the money. The Budget is prepared by the Ministry of Finance in consultation with other ministries, states and experts. Ministry officials hold discussions with non-governmental organisations (NGOs), private sector and other stakeholders before preparing the Budget.

As per Article 112 of the Indian Constitution, it is mandatory for the government to present this annual statement. The Union Budget is classified into Capital Budget, Revenue Budget and Expenditure Budget.

India's first Budget was presented on February 18, 1860, by James Wilson. R K Shanmukham Chetty, the first finance minister of independent India presented the Union Budget on November 26, 1947. In 2001, the then finance minister Yashwant Sinha broke the colonial practice of presenting the Budget in the evening and started the tradition of reading it out from 11 am. Indira Gandhi became the first woman finance minister to present India's Budget in Parliament in 1970. Nirmala Sitharaman, who was appointed as the finance and corporate affairs minister on May 31, 2019, is the second woman to have presented the Budget on July 5, 2019.