130 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
to Assam, at the Imperial charge, of 6 ¼ per cent. instead of 3 per cent. on Land Revenue pending the levy of a cess of a corresponding amount on the ryots. In the Bombay Presidency the 6 ¼ per cent. was imposed some years before and hence is not included in the above table. The only province which did not levy any additional cess was the Central Province, though a cess of 6 ¼ per cent, on the Land Revenue was in 1870 considered practicable but not opportune.
Of what benefit, a cynic may say, was the institution of Provincial Finance if it did not obviate the necessity for further taxation ? If further taxation was unavoidable, why did the Imperial Government throw the onus of facing it on the Provincial Government under the garb of Provincial Budgets when it would have done that itself ? It must be said in reply that the merits of Provincial Finance are to be looked for in other directions, and it will be shown in its proper place that they justified its institution, even though a certain amount of enhanced taxation followed in its wake. It would indeed be unwise to decry against taxation in general, for no benefit can be obtained without a charge. But it would be equally unjust not to protest against the kind of taxation resorted to, for what really mattered was not the increase of taxation but the inequity of taxation. The method of taxation resorted to to make up the deficit in the Provincial Finance was an imposition of rates and cesses on the already over-burdened class of tax-payers, namely the landholders. Now the services incorporated into the Provincial Budgets, for whose support these rates and cesses were levied, though called local, were not more local in the sense of their being beneficial to the particular localities than those retained by the Imperial Government. On the other hand, the former were from the standpoint of the localities as onerous to them as the latter, and yet they were financed by rates and cesses levied from the localities as though they were directly beneficial to them, which as a matter of fact they were not. This is all the more lamentable when it is recalled that the necessity for retrenchment which caused the levy of these rates and cesses was occasioned by the abolition of the income tax. As a matter of justice we should have expected the continuance of the income tax to the relief of the State and the ratepayers. But justice was for a long time absent from the Financial Secretariat of the Government of India. A few cared for it in the abstract, but none looked upon it as an element worthy of consideration in providing for the exigencies of provincial or local finance; and as it was unrecognized, its violation by the Provincial Governments was no bar to the development of Provincial Finance.
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