The Cabinet Committee on Parliamentary Affairs (CCPA), chaired by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, on Wednesday cleared the schedule for Parliament’s upcoming Budget Session.
As per the parliamentary calendar, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the Union Budget for 2026–27 on Sunday, February 1—marking a rare instance in recent years of the Budget being unveiled on a weekend.
The Budget Session will begin with the President’s address to a joint sitting of Parliament on January 28, while the Economic Survey is scheduled to be tabled on January 29. According to an earlier CNBC-TV18 report, preparations for the Budget are already underway.
This will be Sitharaman’s ninth consecutive Union Budget and the 88th Budget since Independence. Since 2017, the Union Budget has been presented at 11 am on February 1, following a change introduced by former finance minister Arun Jaitley to allow for faster implementation of proposals from the start of the financial year.
While a Sunday presentation is unusual, it is not without precedent. Sitharaman presented the Budget 2025 on a Saturday, and Jaitley delivered the 2015 and 2016 Budgets on February 28, both Saturdays.
With this presentation, Sitharaman will also make history as the first finance minister to deliver nine consecutive Union Budgets. She will move closer to the record held by former Prime Minister Morarji Desai, who presented 10 Budgets across two tenures.
Among recent finance ministers, P Chidambaram presented nine Budgets, while Pranab Mukherjee presented eight.
Sitharaman was appointed India’s first full-time woman finance minister in 2019 after Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his second term and continued in the role following the government’s third consecutive victory in 2024.
Meanwhile, the government’s First Advance Estimates released on January 7 project India’s real GDP growth at 7.4% in FY 2025–26, up from 6.5% in the previous year, despite global challenges including tariff-related pressures. These estimates form a key input for the Union Budget, to be presented on February 1.