Nirmala Sitharaman Profile: Rise Of India's First Full-Time Woman Finance Minister Under Modi & Challenges In A Pandemic-hit Economy

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman Profile: The 62-year-old finance minister is trying to bail out of the economy from impact of the pandemic. The FM has major challenges to deal on five fronts from propping the domestic demand, creating jobs, ending the credit crunch to bringing investments and raising spending without impacting the inflation.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman Profile: Nirmala Sitharaman, who has been serving the first full-time woman finance minister of the country, is steering India’s economy out of one of the toughest economic crises in history. In the past it was former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who only held finance as an additional portfolio for a shorter duration. In second term of the BJP government in 2019, Nirmala Sitharaman was given two key portfolios including the finance ministry and the corporate affairs ministry. Nirmala Sitharaman remained one of the most trusted confidants of PM Modi's, and was charged with the defence ministry during the first stint of the Modi government. Initially, she had been made a Minister of State in 2014 and given the portfolio of commerce & industry with independent charge. She was the first woman to be appointed full-time Defence Minister of India in September 2017.

Here is the journey of the 62-year-old BJP stalwart reaching the power corridors of the nation

Initial years

Born on 18 August, 1959 in Madurai, the finance minister was raised in a middle-class family in Tamil Nadu. Her father, Shri Narayan Sitharaman was a Railways employee while her Savitri Sitharaman was a homemaker.  Sitharaman did her schooling from Madras and Tiruchirappalli and completed her BA in Economics from Seethalakshmi Ramaswamy College in Tiruchirappalli. Further, she pursued masters from JNU in 1984. Also, she has done a PhD in dissertation on Indo European textile trade. She is also an alumnus of London School of Economics.

 An affair with politics

A member of the Rajya Sabha, Sitharaman did not contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Before joining active politics, Sitharaman worked in the corporate sector after earning a masters degree from the Jawaharlal Nehru University.  In JNU she met Parakala Prabhakar and later in 1986 she got married to him and moved to London where she joined the British Broadcasting Corporation. She returned to India in the 1990s and became an educationist.

The leader was nominated to the National Commission for Women during the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Sitharaman joined the BJP in 2008 and became the party spokesperson the next year. In 2014, she became a member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha as a BJP candidate.

As a defence minister, Sitharaman firecely defended the Narendra Modi government against allegations of corruption by the Opposition in the Rafale aircraft deal signed between India and France. It is only to the credit of Sitharaman who managed to put up strong arguments in public and Parliament, as the Opposition harped on alleged corruption in the Rafale deal as a poll plank in the run-up to Lok Sabha elections 2019. Sitharaman was also a member of the committee tasked with preparing the BJP's manifesto for the elections. In January 2019, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi took a dig at Sitharaman, saying that PM Modi “got a woman to defend him” on the Rafale deal debate in Parliament. However, she stood the ground and defend her party.

Maiden Budget

As a finance minister Sitharaman released her maiden Budget on July 5, 2019. In the Budget session, she considered the tax relief offered by Piyush Goyal to the salaried class in the Interim Budget. Although she didnt make any major changes to the taxation waiver given by Goyal for those earning up to Rs 5 lakh annually, but she increased the surcharge for those with an annual taxable income of over Rs 2 crore. 

Steering the economy during pandemic

Her stint as the finance minister since last May has been dampened with economic mishappenings. An MA in economics and having experience as a junior minister earlier, Sitharaman’s choice was also not out of place.  She took the reins of the economy at a time when things are heading south owing to pandemic. In September 2020, after the GDP data was released, hashtags like #ResignNirmala began trending which only exhibted the distrust in the government and eventuall the FM. Another incident which made it difficult for her was the crisis around the Modi government’s inability to pay states their GST dues, and unlike former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, her lack of of skills to build consensus came to the fore.

In May, the FM completed the last leg of the ₹20 lakh crore economic package announced by announced by the Centre during the pandemic which comprised of several reforms, fiscal and liquidity measures.  It is only wait and watch if the economic decisions taken by the finance minister will rescue the economy from the current situation.

Sitaraman will have to fight on five major fronts that includes getting the domestic demand back on track, creating jobs, ending the credit crunch even as banks have had some success in bringing down the share of toxic assets on their books but the pandemic could undo those gains. Another challenge remains raising spending without impacting the inflation and getting investments on track.