On February 1, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is going to present the Union Budget 2026 to Parliament. This would be her seventh straight Union Budget, marking her as India's longest-serving Finance Minister under the same Prime Minister. With this, Sitharaman also approaches the record set by Morarji Desai, who presented ten union budgets, and ties P Chidambaram's total of nine budgets presented while in power.
This will be the third Union Budget of the Modi 3.0 government, and behind the scenes, a carefully structured team of senior bureaucrats and economic policymakers is working closely with the Finance Minister to shape the document.
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The core team: familiar faces return
Several key officials in Sitharaman’s Budget 2026 war room will be continuing from the previous Budget cycle. CBDT Chairman Ravi Agrawal, DIPAM Secretary Arunish Chawla, Financial Services Secretary M Nagaraju, and Chief Economic Adviser V Anantha Nageswaran remain central to the process. Their continuity ensures policy consistency, particularly on taxation, disinvestment, banking, and macroeconomic assessment.
Key secretaries who took charge last year
Among the senior officers who assumed charge in the past year are Vumlunmang Vualnam, Secretary (Expenditure); Arvind Srivastava, Secretary (Revenue); and Anuradha Thakur, Secretary (Economic Affairs). Srivastava, notably, previously headed the Budget Division and has also served in the Prime Minister’s Office, giving him direct experience with both fiscal planning and executive coordination.
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Senior-most officers and recent appointments
K Moses Chalai, Secretary of Public Enterprises, is the senior-most officer in Sitharaman’s current team. In the indirect tax administration, Vivek Chaturvedi took over as Chairman of the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) in December.
The Budget Division itself is headed by Vyasan R, Joint Secretary in charge of Budget, who assumed the role a few months ago. Vyasan was also part of the previous Union Budget exercise, adding another layer of institutional continuity to the 2026 process.
