page_title: Yashwant Sinha
section_title: Finance minister
hierarchical_section_title: Yashwant Sinha / Finance minister
caption_attribution_description: English: Yashwant Sinha, Member of Parliament; Minister of External Affairs (2002-2004) and Minister of Finance of India (1998-2002), captured during a session (Global Economic Leadership: Is Asia in the Driver’s Seat?) of the World Economic Forum on East Asia 2008 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, June 15, 2008.
context_page_description: Yashwant Sinha is a former Indian administrator, politician and a former Minister of Finance. He was a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party before he quit the party on 21 April 2018. His son Jayant Sinha, a consultant and investor, won the 2019 elections for the Hazaribagh constituency and was former Minister of State for Civil Aviation in Narendra Modi's cabinet.
  In 2015, he was awarded Officier de la Légion d’Honneur, the highest civilian distinction of France.
context_section_description: Sinha was the finance minister until 1 July 2002, when he exchanged jobs with foreign minister Jaswant Singh. Sinha, during his tenure, was forced to roll back some of his government's major policy initiatives for which he was much criticised. Still, Sinha is widely credited for pushing through several major reform measures that put the Indian economy on a firm growth trajectory. Among them are lowering of real interest rates, introducing tax deduction for mortgage interest, freeing up the telecommunications sector, helping fund the National Highways Authority, and deregulating the petroleum industry. Sinha is also known for being the first Finance Minister to break the 53-year tradition of presenting the Indian budget at 5 pm local time, a practice held over from British Rule days that sought to present the Indian budget at a time convenient to the British Parliament (1130am GMT) rather than India's Parliament.
  Sinha has written a comprehensive account of his years as Finance Minister titled Confessions of a Swadeshi Reformer.
  Yashwant Sinha has been accused by opponents, and by other political observers of trying to promote nepotism by nominating his son Jayant Sinha as a successor to contest from Hazaribagh overlooking the interests of many other loyal party workers, though he tried to justify the nomination of his son as a party decision.
caption: Sinha speaking at World Economic Forum on East Asia in 2008
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