Nirmala Sitharaman took over the Finance Ministry for the second time on Wednesday and is expected to give the final Budget for FY '25, which would set the tone for the Modi 3.0 government's priorities and Viksit Bharat's direction.
Sitharaman arrived at the North Block office and was received by Finance Secretary T V Somanathan and other important officials. The Minister of State for Finance, Pankaj Chaudhary, was also present. Chaudhary took over on Tuesday evening.
Sitharaman, who is credited with taking forward second-generation reforms in her last tenure, would set a record by presenting the seventh Budget in a row and sixth complete Budget consecutively.
The full budget for FY 25 is expected to be submitted to the newly formed 18th Lok Sabha next month.
In her political career, she has achieved several accomplishments. She set a landmark when she became the first female Raksha Mantri, or Defence Minister, in 2017. Previously, she served as Minister of Industry and Commerce.
When her mentor Arun Jaitley (Finance Minister 2014-19) became unwell, Sitharaman was given control of the finance ministry in the freshly re-elected Modi administration following the 2019 general election.
She was the first full-time female Finance Minister in Independent India. Indira Gandhi previously had finance as an extra ministry while serving as India's Prime Minister for a brief period of time.
Soon after gaining office, the first major change was a reduction in base corporation tax to 22% from 30% to help the economy recover from demonetisation and GST implementation.
After the Modi administration seized office in 2014, Arun Jaitley took over the Finance Ministry and delivered five budgets in a row, from 2014-15 to 2018-19.
In 2017, Jaitley broke with the colonial practice of presenting the Budget on the final working day of February and moved it to the first of the month.
Sitharaman followed in her mentor's footsteps, ditching the customary Budget briefcase in favor of a bahi-khata with the National Emblem to carry the speech and other papers.
Nirmala Sitharaman was born in Madurai on August 18, 1959, to Narayan Sitharaman (a railway employee) and Savitri (a housewife). She studied economics at Tiruchirapalli's Seethalakshmi Ramaswami College.
She subsequently relocated to the capital to complete her Master's and M.Phil in the topic at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Prior to entering politics, Sitharaman worked in the business sector in the United Kingdom, where she lived with her husband, Parakala Prabhakar.
They met while studying at JNU and got married in 1986. They have a daughter named Parakala Vangmayi.
Sitharaman's political career began in 2008, when she joined the BJP (she returned to India in the early 1990s), and in two years she became the party's second female spokesperson after Sushma Swaraj, fielding questions from journalists at the party headquarters and becoming a familiar face on television debates.
Prior to entering politics, she worked as the deputy director of Hyderabad's Centre for Public Policy Studies and founded a school in the city. From 2003 to 2005, she was a member of the National Commission on Women.
