Amid economic slowdown, Nirmala Sitharaman to present budget today

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will on Saturday present the budget of the second term of the Narendra Modi government.

This will also be the second budget for Sitharaman, who became 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 2021.

The Budget speech will begin at around 11 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.

The Finance Minister on Friday tabled in Parliament the pre-Budget Economic Survey for 2019-20, which projected the state of the economy and outlined its challenges. The survey was released by Chief Economic Adviser Krishnamurthy Subramanian.

The Union Budget 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. Sitharaman had presented her maiden budget in July last year, shortly after the BJP-led government came back to power in the Centre in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Till 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.

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