When Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stood up in Lok Sabha to present the Union Budget, her third, the question on many minds was whether she would set another record with the length of her speech. She did not.

Sitharaman on Monday began her speech at 11.02 am and ended at 12.50 pm, speaking for 1 hour and 48 minutes. This was almost one hour shorter than her 2020 speech.

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Her last Budget speech on February 1, 2020 had run into 2 hours and 42 minutes. The then 60-year-old leader still had two pages to read when she cut short her speech after feeling unwell. She still broke her own record of 2019, when her speech ran into 2 hours and 17 minutes.

Before this, former Union Finance Minister Jaswant Singh held the record of reading out the budget for two hours and 13 minutes in 2003 while Arun Jaitley spoke for two hours and 10 minutes to present the budget in 2014.

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In terms of the number of words, Manmohan Singh, the politician said to be most reticent, in 1991 delivered a Budget speech comprising 18,650 words. He was then the Finance Minister in the Narasimha Rao government

Sitharaman’s 2020 speech in comparison ran into 13,275 words.