Nirmala Sitharaman (born 18 August 1959) is an Indian economist and politician serving as the Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs of India since 2019. She is a member of the Rajya Sabha, upper house of the Indian Parliament, since 2014. Sitharaman previously served as the Defence Minister of India, thereby becoming India's second female defence minister and the second female finance minister after Indira Gandhi, and the first full-time female minister to hold each of those portfolios. She has served as the Minister of State for Finance and Corporate Affairs under the Ministry of Finance and the Minister for Commerce and Industry with independent charge. Prior to that, she served as a national spokesperson for the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Sitharaman featured in the Forbes 2022 list of World's 100 most powerful women and was ranked 36. Fortune ranked Nirmala Sitharaman as the most powerful woman in India.
Nirmala Sitharaman was born in a Tamil Iyengar family in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, to Savitri and Narayanan Sitharaman. She had her schooling from Madras and Tiruchirappalli. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics at the Seethalakshmi Ramaswami College, Tiruchirapalli in 1980, Master of Arts degree in economics and M.Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in 1984. She then enrolled for a Ph.D. program in Economics with a focus on Indo-Europe trade; but later left this program and moved to London (when her husband secured a scholarship in London School of Economics) because of which she was unable to complete her degree.
Sitharaman joined the BJP in 2006 and was appointed in 2010 as a spokesperson for the party. In 2014, she was inducted into Narendra Modi's cabinet as a junior minister 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. She has served as the Defence Minister of India and headed the Balakot Air Strike carried out by the Indian Air Force in 2019. She is currently serving as the Minister of Finance and Corporate affairs of India and has presented five annual budgets of India (as of 2023). India reached the mark of a $3.1 trillion economy under her leadership.