Complete List of Union Budgets Presented Under the Modi Government

Every February, India’s finance minister presents the government’s annual spending and taxation plan for the coming year. This article compiles the full list of Union Budgets presented since Modi took office in 2014, including who presented each one and the notable firsts along the way.

The Arun Jaitley Years (2014–2019)

Arun Jaitley, as Modi’s first Finance Minister, presented an interim budget on February 17, 2014, ahead of that year’s general election, followed by his first full budget after Modi’s government took office later that year. Jaitley went on to present the government’s budgets annually through his tenure, a period that included the rollout of GST, covered in more detail in our separate article on that reform, and demonetization’s fiscal aftermath.

A Shift in the Calendar

One of the more consequential procedural changes during Jaitley’s tenure was the shift in the budget’s presentation date. Starting in 2017, the government moved the budget presentation from the “last working day of February,” the long-standing tradition, to February 1st specifically, a change intended to let the budget’s provisions take effect before the new fiscal year begins on April 1, rather than leaving a gap of several weeks between passage and implementation as the older February-end schedule had.

The 2019 Interim Budget

Ahead of the 2019 general election, Piyush Goyal, standing in for Jaitley during a period of ill health, presented the interim budget on February 1, 2019, an interim budget being a more limited financial statement presented in an election year, with a full budget to follow once the new government took office.

The Nirmala Sitharaman Era (2019–Present)

Following the 2019 election, Nirmala Sitharaman became Finance Minister and has presented every subsequent budget since, making her the government’s longest-serving budget presenter across Modi’s tenure. Her first full budget, presented on July 5, 2019, broke with a longer tradition by having her carry the budget documents in a “bahi-khata,” a traditional Indian cloth-wrapped accounting ledger, rather than the leather briefcase previous finance ministers had conventionally used, a symbolic choice widely covered as a deliberate break from a colonial-era visual tradition.

The First Paperless Budget

Sitharaman’s February 1, 2021 budget marked a further notable milestone: the first fully paperless Union Budget in India’s history, presented using a digital tablet wrapped in the same traditional bahi-khata-style pouch rather than printed documents, a change driven partly by pandemic-era logistical considerations and partly as a broader digitisation step consistent with the government’s wider push toward digital governance covered elsewhere in this series.

What This Timeline Represents

Taken together, this list spans two finance ministers across more than a decade, covering budgets presented through demonetization, the GST rollout, a global pandemic, and multiple general elections, each budget reflecting the specific economic priorities and constraints of its particular moment rather than a single unchanging fiscal approach across the entire period.

How the Fiscal Deficit Target Moved Across These Budgets

One thread that runs across nearly every one of these budgets is the government’s stated fiscal deficit target, the gap between what the government spends and what it collects, expressed as a share of GDP. According to figures widely cited in budget-season coverage by outlets including the Business Standard, the fiscal deficit target stood at 4.1 percent of GDP in the 2014-15 budget and was gradually reduced across most subsequent years, before spiking sharply to 9.2 percent in 2020-21 as pandemic-related spending and a collapse in tax collection combined, and has since been steadily brought back down, with Sitharaman’s more recent budgets targeting a path back toward roughly 4.5 percent by 2025-26. This deficit trajectory is one of the clearest year-on-year threads connecting an otherwise varied set of budgets shaped by very different economic circumstances.

What Each Budget Prioritised

Beyond the procedural firsts, each year’s budget also reflected a distinct policy emphasis. Early Jaitley-era budgets focused heavily on infrastructure spending and banking-sector recapitalisation following a period of stressed bank balance sheets. The 2019 budgets, both Goyal’s interim version and Sitharaman’s first full budget, leaned into rural and farmer-focused spending ahead of and following that year’s general election, including expanded income-support schemes for farmers. The 2021 and 2022 budgets, presented during and immediately after the pandemic, prioritised healthcare spending and capital expenditure aimed at reviving economic activity, while more recent budgets under Sitharaman have placed growing emphasis on capital expenditure for infrastructure and, according to reporting on the 2023 and 2024 budgets, targeted tax relief for the middle class through changes to income tax slabs.

The 2024 Full Budget After the General Election

Because 2024 was a general election year, the government followed the same interim-then-full pattern seen in 2019: Sitharaman presented an interim budget in February 2024 ahead of the election, followed by a full budget in July 2024 after Modi’s third-term government took office, a full budget that, according to coverage at the time, placed particular emphasis on employment-linked incentive schemes for first-time employees and continued infrastructure spending, alongside adjustments to the income tax regime aimed at leaving more disposable income with salaried taxpayers under the newer, simplified tax structure the government had been gradually encouraging taxpayers to shift toward since its introduction a few years earlier.

Bottom Line

Modi’s government has been served by two finance ministers presenting its Union Budgets since 2014, Arun Jaitley through 2019 and Nirmala Sitharaman since, with the period marked by a shift to a February 1 presentation date, a symbolic break from the traditional briefcase, and, in 2021, India’s first entirely paperless budget.

FAQ

Abhyudaya Verma