Nirmala Sitharaman
Nirmala Sitharaman is an Indian economist and politician who is serving as the 30th Minister of Finance and 32nd Minister of Corporate Affairs since 2019. A senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party . She has represented Karnataka as a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, since 2016, prior to representing Andhra Pradesh from 2014 to 2016. In 2026, she became the first person to table the Union Budget 9 consecutive times. She is second only to Morarji Desai to present the most number of budgets.
She served as a junior minister in the First Modi ministry between 2014 and 2017, holding successive positions, first for her dual appointment as the Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance and the Minister of State in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs from May to November 2014, and then as the Minister of State for the Ministry of Commerce and Industry from May 2014 to September 2017, before being elevated to senior posts within the Union Cabinet. Sitharaman previously served as the 28th Defence Minister from 2017 to 2019, becoming India's second female defence minister and the second female finance minister after Indira Gandhi, and the first full-time female minister to hold each of those portfolios. In July 2025, she became the longest continuous serving finance minister in Indian history, by surpassing C.D. Deshmukh.
Early life and education
Nirmala Sitharaman was born into a Tamil Iyengar family in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, to Savitri and Narayanan Sitharaman. She did her schooling at the Sacred Heart Convent Anglo-Indian School, Villupuram, till the primary level and thereafter at Vidyodaya School in Chennai. She then studied at St. Philomena’s School and at Holy Cross School in Tiruchirappalli.Sitharaman obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Seethalakshmi Ramaswami College, Tiruchirapalli, in 1980, and a Master of Arts degree in Economics and M.Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, in 1984. She then enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Economics with a focus on Indo-European trade but later left this program and moved to London when her husband secured a scholarship at the London School of Economics.
Non-political career
Nirmala Sitharaman worked as a salesperson at Habitat, a home decor store in London's Regent Street. She has served as an assistant to Economist in the Agricultural Engineers Association in the UK. During her stay in the UK, she has also served as a Senior Manager for PwC and briefly at the BBC World Service. In 2017, she was one of the founding directors of Pranava The School, a private co-educational school in Hyderabad.Early political career
Nirmala Sitharaman served as a member of the National Commission for Women from 2003 to 2005. She then joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2008 as a national spokesperson until 2014. In 2014, she was inducted into Narendra Modi's first cabinet as the Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry and was elected in June of that year as a Rajya Sabha Member from Andhra Pradesh. In May 2016, she was one of the 12 candidates nominated by the BJP to contest the Rajya Sabha elections due on 11 June. She successfully contested her seat from Karnataka.Union Cabinet Minister
Union Defence Minister
On 3 September 2017, she was appointed as Minister of Defence, being only the second woman after Indira Gandhi to hold the post, but the first full-time female defence minister. Under her tenure, the army conducted the Balakot airstrike in retaliation to the 2019 Pulwama attack. The Government of India did not give a figure of the number of deaths caused by the strikes.Union Finance Minister
On 31 May 2019, Nirmala Sitharaman was appointed as the finance and corporate affairs minister. She is India's first full-time female finance minister. She presented her maiden budget in the Indian parliament on 5 July 2019. During the COVID-19 pandemic in India she was made in-charge of the COVID-19 Economic Response Task Force. Under her tenure as the finance minister in 2022, India became the fifth largest economy in the world, and the GDP of the country was said to have seen massive growth positively with historical context.She was given the same cabinet posts after the Indian general election in June 2024. In February 2026, she introduced the Union Budget for the ninth consecutive year, becoming the first person to do so. Overall, she has presented the budget the second-most times after Morarji Desai, who delivered it ten times across different time periods. She also became the first minister to present the budget in the New Parliament building of India.