New Delhi: Pranab Mukherjee earned a unique distinction today when he became the first finance minister to present Budgets on either side of an election and the first to do so after a quarter-century gap.
No other finance minister in independent India has presented an interim Budget before the elections and then followed that up with a regular Budget for the same year after being voted back to power.
The other distinction of 73-year-old Mukherjee was that no other finance minister has presented two regular Budgets with as large a gap between them as 25 years.
His last three Budgets were presented between 1982 and 1984. Mukherjee, who was rated as the best finance minister in the world in 1984 in a survey by Euromoney magazine, had also presented the interim budget before the recent elections.
PTI
