Nirmala Sitharaman

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 (R&D) 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.

Electoral history

Awards and honours

The Jawaharlal Nehru University conferred her the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2019. Forbes Magazine has ranked her 24th among the 100 most powerful women in the world in 2025. This was her seventh consecutive time on the illustrious list. Previously she came in at number 34 in 2019, 41st in 2020, 37th on the list in 2021, 36th in 2022, 32nd in 2023 and 28th in 2024. She was also awarded the Business Reformer of the Year 2021 at the Economic Times Awards for Corporate Excellence.

Controversies

In June 2025, a Delhi court issued a notice to her in connection with a criminal defamation plea filed by Lipika Mitra, the wife of former AAP minister Somnath Bharti.

Personal life

Sitharaman met her husband, economist and commentator Parakala Prabhakar, who is from Narsapuram, Andhra Pradesh, while studying at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. They married in 1986 and have a daughter who previously worked for The Hindu and currently works for Mint Lounge. Prabhakar served as the communications advisor to the Government of Andhra Pradesh from 2014 to 2018.

References

References

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