Nirmala Sitharaman, one of the few to have served as Union Minister in both the 2014 and 2019 Modi cabinets, was sworn in as Union Cabinet Minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new Union Council of Ministers on Sunday evening at Rashtrapati Bhavan. She took the oath in English.
#WATCH | BJP leader Nirmala Sitharaman takes oath as Union Cabinet minister in the Modi government pic.twitter.com/gCeTLbmR7T
— ANI (@ANI) June 9, 2024
In the 2014 cabinet, she held positions as the Minister of State for Finance and Corporate Affairs, later assuming charge as the Minister for Commerce and Industry with Independent Charge. In 2017, she was appointed as the Union Defence Minister.
During the 2019 term, Sitharaman took office as the Union Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs, becoming the first woman to hold the position full-time. Previously, Indira Gandhi briefly held finance as an additional portfolio during her tenure as Prime Minister.
Sitharaman entered the Rajya Sabha in 2014 and was re-elected in 2016. She has not contested Lok Sabha elections thus far, maintaining her membership with the Bharatiya Janata Party since 2008. Born in 1959 in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, she has a longstanding political career.
Upon returning to India, she held the position of Deputy Director at the Centre for Public Policy Studies in Hyderabad. From 2003 to 2005, she served as a member of the National Commission for Women, actively advocating for various women’s empowerment issues.
In her role as Union Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman has presented six budgets to date, including the February 1 Interim Budget. She became the second finance minister to present six consecutive budgets, equaling the record set by former PM Morarji Desai. As the first full-time female finance minister of India, Sitharaman has presented five full budgets since July 2019, surpassing the records of her predecessors such as Manmohan Singh, Arun Jaitley, P Chidambaram, and Yashwant Sinha, each of whom presented five consecutive budgets.