In numbers and charts: A history of India’s Budgets since 1947

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Union budget, which lays out a roadmap for India’s fiscal and financial reforms, is a widely anticipated event every year. Over the years, various governments have tried to strike a balance between economic growth and social equality through allocation of the resources in their budgets.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has a similar task cut out for her in the upcoming budget. Mint brings you interesting data points about budgets over the decades. The economic burden of the massive humanitarian crisis created by the partition was evident in the first budget of independent India presented by R.K.

Shanmukham Chetty in November 1947. The defence forces played a pivotal role in the rehabilitation of refugees. The country was also in the middle of a military conflict with Pakistan.

As a result, a staggering 47% of the total expenditure was earmarked for defence. The fiscal deficit was as much as 21% of the expenditure. The first budget aimed to earn more than 80% of the government’s income from taxes.

Today, the expenditure on defence has come down to 8%, and borrowings and other liabilities form one-third of overall receipts. Since Independence, there have been 92 Union budgets, including 12 interim budgets that are presented before elections. Nirmala Sitharaman will table her eighth and the country's 93rd budget on Saturday.

Morarji Desai, who later became the prime minister of India, has tabled the highest number of budgets—10 of them. Congress' P. Chidambaram is at the second spot with nine budgets.