Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman faced resistance from opposition parties in Parliament on Saturday as she started presenting Union Budget 2025. Opposition leaders, led by Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, staged a walkout, protesting the deaths in Maha Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj.
Moments before the Budget was being presented in Lok Sabha, Opposition parties, led by Akhilesh Yadav, started demanding a discussion on the tragedy in Kumbh from in the Well of the House. They left the House when the FM started reading her Budget speech. But came back moments later.
A pre-dawn stampede at Maha Kumbh during Mauni Amavasya on January 29 left nearly 30 people dead and 60 injured, the police said on January 31.
Samajwadi Party demanded that the government release the list of people who lost their lives in the Maha Kumbh stampede
Before presenting her eighth Budget, Sitharaman met President Droupadi Murmu at the Rashtrapati Bhavan before heading to Parliament. President Murmu offered ‘dahi-chini’ (curd-sugar), considered auspicious, to Sitharaman before she left for Parliament to present the Union Budget.
“Union Minister for Finance and Corporate Affairs Smt Nirmala Sitharaman along with Minister of State for Finance Shri Pankaj Chaudhary and senior officials of the Ministry of Finance called on President Droupadi Murmu at Rashtrapati Bhavan before presenting the Union Budget. The President expressed best wishes to the Union Finance Minister and her team for the presentation of budget,” President’s office said in a post on X.
Before the actual presentation in Parliament, the Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved the Budget for fiscal 2025-26 (April 2025 to March 2026).
Clamour for tax relief is running high as Sitharaman presents her eighth Budget in the Lok Sabha on Saturday.
The Budget would give a glimpse of the Modi government’s measures to boost economy which is expected to slow down to 6.4 per cent in the current financial year while outlining the roadmap to make India ‘Viksit Bharat’ by 2047.
Sitharaman continues with the tradition she set in 2019, carrying the budget speech in a ‘bahi-khata’, which she used after dropping the briefcase tradition.
