Development, Jobs, Health: Comparing Nirmala Sitharaman's Budget Speeches

Development was the top theme in all three budget speeches that is, the 2023, Interim and 2024 Budget.

With the recently announced budget for 2024-25, we compared the budget speeches for 2023, interim and 2024 speeches presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. In this, we counted the number of times a particular word or phrase was repeated in the finance minister's speech.

The latest budget comes right after the General Elections, the results of which were announced on 4 June.

In this, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) 293 seats, with the BJP bagging 240 seats.

Between the three speeches, development topped the list followed by employment and education.

We looked for the following words in 2023: Common man, Employment, Inflation, Railways, MSMEs, Women, Development, Capital Gains, Climate change, Tax relief, Innovation, Foreign Direct Investment/FDI, Overseas investment, Lower and middle-income, Education, Health, Defence, Aviation, Karnataka, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and North East.

Interim and 2024 Budget: Common man, Employment, Inflation, Railways, MSMEs, Women, Development, Capital Gains, Climate change, Tax relief, Innovation, Foreign Direct Investment/FDI, Overseas investment, Lower and middle-income, Education, Health, Defence, Aviation, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar/Gaya/Buxar

What we found: Development was the most used word in the three speeches. This was followed by Employment, Education and MSMEs.

In the 2024 Budget speech, Sitharaman emphasised upon Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, BJP's main allies in the NDA government. She spoke about Bihar twelve times and Andhra Pradesh five times in her speech. Many opposition parties and leaders have expressed criticism against the budget calling it the "Nitish-Naidu Budget."

In the 2023 speech, the finance minister spoke about Karnataka and its drought-prone areas once in her speech. This was also the year when Karnataka went to the polls for its assembly elections.

Methodology: We made a list of themes and phrases and then went through the budget speeches, the documents of which are available on indiabudget.gov.in/.