The Union Budget speech can be a mighty tedious job — for the Finance Minister presenting it, for the Opposition parties who always seem to be ready with their brickbats and for the general public who will be listening to it.
Which Finance Minister holds the dubious honour of presenting the longest budget speech, in terms of word count?
A whopping 18,650-word financial chessboard presented by Manmohan Singh in July 1991.
Take a look at how a few other finance ministers fare in terms of verbose budget speeches.
And who holds the record for presenting the most number of budgets?
Highest number of budgets presented
Morarji Desai 10 times
P. Chidambaram 9 times
Pranab Mukherjee, C.D. Deshmukh, Yashwant Sinha 7 times
Apart from speeches replete with market jargon, some Finance Ministers have tried to embellish their proposals by quoting from their favourite literature. The most obvious example of this would be P. Chidambaram who has regularly quoted the Tamil saint-poet Thiruvalluvar in every budget he presented since 1996. Read more about this particular trend >here .
How long will this year’s budget speech be? Which poet do you think will feature?
