Sitharaman’s budget speeches have mostly been positive in tone despite covid

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India’s first woman finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, will deliver her 6th Budget speech on 1 February 2024. She is the fifth finance minister (FM) since the 1980s to have delivered five consecutive budget speeches (for 2019-20 to 2023-24) and now she will present an interim budget ahead of national elections later this year. Other FMs who delivered five consecutive speeches were Manmohan Singh (1991-92 to 1995-96), Yashwant Sinha (1998-99 to 2002-03), P.

Chidambaram (2004-05 to 2008-09), and Arun Jaitley (2014-15 to 2018-19). Here, the years refer to the fiscal year for which the budget was prepared for. For example, the 2019-20 speech is a budget speech delivered in February 2019 for the next fiscal year.

How do the current FM’s speeches compare on length, complexity and sentiment tones with those of her predecessors? And what can be expected this year? First, the last two budget speeches by Sitharaman were the shortest. The length of her speeches has now fallen for three consecutive years, after peaking in 2020-21. It was this lengthy speech in February 2020 that the FM had to cut short on account of exhaustion.

On average, Yashwant Sinha’s speeches were longer than those of others. Second, while the speeches of the current FM have become shorter, they are not easier to understand. Four of her five speeches have the highest speech complexity in the sample.

We calculate the complexity metric for each speech using the Flesch readability ease test. This test’s score ranges from 0 to 100, with a higher score suggesting a lower level of reading difficulty. Third, according to our text sentiment analysis, India’s incumbent FM has delivered the sample’s top three speeches with the highest share of positive-sentiment