150 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
about 3 lakhs a year. But the expenditure during the same period amounted to Rs. 2,40,77,885, being an excess of Rs. 42,31,915 in all or about 6 lakhs a year. The difference therefore between the excess assignment of 3 lakhs, and the excess expenditure of 6 lakhs a year, had to be made good by the Imperial Government by special grants averaging 2 [3] / 4 lakhs every year to maintain the solvency of the Province. [1] The Government of India while making the supplementary assignments was not unconscious of the demoralizing effect of such doles. In fact it was admitted that it would have been much better to have augmented the provincial assignments to Burma by 22½ lakhs at the start had it foreseen the necessity for it, than to have been obliged to grant an equal amount in the form of supplementary aids so detrimental to economy and good management. The experience of Burma had driven home the fatuity of assignments as a mode of supply and the Government of India had realized that elasticity in revenues was a vital condition for the success of Provincial Finance. To assign revenues to Burma was therefore inevitable. Being overborne by the needs of the Province and by the fact that the Province yielded a substantial surplus to the Imperial treasury, the Government of India conceded that the Province was “entitled to have its real wants supplied more liberally than heretofore.” [2] It is in the method adopted for the purpose of giving a liberal treatment to the province of Burma that the new step in the method of supply to the Provinces was taken. In the settlements made in 1877-8 with the five Provinces—Central Provinces, N.W.P. and Oudh, the Punjab, Bombay and Bengal—the Heads of Account under Revenue and Expenditure comprising the Indian Budget were grouped under two distinct categories : (1) wholly Imperial and
(2) wholly Provincial. But in the case of Burma the Heads of Account were grouped under three distinct categories :
(1) wholly Imperial, (2) wholly Provincial, and (3) jointly Imperial and Provincial. [3] In so far as items of revenue and expenditure were in the exclusive keeping of the Imperial or the Provincial Government, the settlement did not differ in spirit from that obtaining in other provinces. The difference consisted in carving out a third category of Account to be made of jointly Imperial and Provincial. By it certain revenues
1 Finance Department Resolution No. 1488 dated March 26, 1879, para. 2.
2 Ibid., para. 22.
3 Financial Statement, 1879-80, para. 24.