BUDGET BY ASSIGNED REVENUES 133
their management continued to expand the assignments made to them remained fixed in amount. Sir John Strachey, to whom belonged the credit of carrying the scheme a stage further, was particularly alive to this weakness of the system. In place of fixed assignments he desired to give the provinces certain sources of revenue, the yield of which largely depended upon good management. His primary object in doing this, no doubt, was to make better and more elastic provision for the growing needs of the provincialized services. But he had also another, and, as he conceived it, a far more important reason in the substitution for assignments of assigned revenues. That economy was the fruit of good management had by that time become a commonplace, but few were sure as to what good management consisted in. it was Sir John Strachey who, for the first time, defined in unmistakable language his notion of good management, which was since his time applied in an everincreasing degree in the development of Provincial Finance. To him good management of finance was to be had
“not by any action which gentlemen of the Financial Department or by any other department of the supreme Government can take whilst sitting hundreds or thousands of miles away in their offices in Calcutta or Simla; not by examining figures or writing circulars, but by giving to the Local Governments...... a direct and, so to speak, a personal interest in efficient management.” [1]
And in this he had the strong support of recent experience; for, taking the results of the past stage the provinces not only managed the services at a lesser cost to the revenue than was the case under the Imperial regime, but the services yielded increased revenue under the more immediate and fostering care of the provinces than they did under the remote, uninformed, and therefore impotent vigilance of the Imperial Government.
Sir John Strachey had long held to the view that so long as the Provinces collected the revenues for the Government of India they did not care to check evasion, which they would have surely done if they had collected them for their immediate benefit, or, as he put it,
“when the Local Governments feel that good administration of branches of revenues will give them, and not to the Government of India alone, increased income and increased means of carrying out the improvements which they have at
1 Financial Statement, 1877-8.