Nirmala Sitharaman

Profile Overview

Nirmala Sitharaman (born 18 August 1959) is an Indian economist and politician who is serving as the 30th Minister of Finance and 32nd Minister of Corporate Affairs since 2019. She previously served as the Minister of Defence from 2017 to 2019. A member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), she was elected as a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, from Karnataka in July 2016.
Born in a Tamil family in 1959 at Madurai, Sitharaman obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Seethalakshmi Ramaswami College in 1980, and a Master of Arts in Economics and Master of Philosophy from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1984. She briefly worked in various roles in the United Kingdom before returning to India. In 2003, she was appointed as a member of the National Commission for Women from 2003, and served till 2005.
Sitharaman joined the BJP in 2008 and served as a national spokesperson for the party from 2010 to 2014. In May 2014, she was appointed as the minister of state with an independent charge of the ministry of commerce and industry in the first Modi ministry, and held the position till September 2017. She also held the role of minister of state in the finance and corporate affairs ministries briefly from May to November 2014. After assuming office, she was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Andhra Pradesh in June 2014. On 3 September 2017, she was appointed as the 28th defence minister.
On 30 May 2019, Sitharaman was appointed as the minister of finance and corporate affairs in the second Modi ministry. After serving for five years, she was reappointed to the position in the third Modi ministry in June 2024, after the National Democratic Alliance won the 2024 Indian general election. She is the first woman to hold the positions of minister of defence and minister of finance full-time. In July 2025, she became the longest continuous-serving Indian finance minister, surpassing C. D. Deshmukh. In February 2026, she became the first Indian finance minister to present the union budget for nine consecutive times.