198 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
tion of the different agencies through which the financial business of the Government of India is conducted, and through which the revenues are collected and the expenditure is defrayed. The revenue and expenditure, for instance, shown under “Bombay” represent the income and outgo which pass through the books of the Accountant General of the Government of India stationed at Bombay, and the same is true of entries under the heads of other Provincial Governments. The figures really represent the transactions of the Government of India distributed geographically, and there is nothing provincial about them in the least. However, such a system of account bears the impression that the system of finance in India is primarily Federal.
With these three incidents before one’s mind it was easy to fall into a federal line of thinking in reasoning about the financial relationship between the Central and Provincial Governments in British India. So deep seated was the view that the Indian system was one of separation of sources and contributions from the yield, that many witnesses giving evidence before the Royal Commissions on Indian Expenditure (1892) and on Decentralization in British India (1909) sallied forth to assail the Commissioners with the criticisms on the inequity of the system and proposals for amending it according to what they considered to be the requirements of justice. Nowhere have they stated the reasons for their assumptions in explicit terms. [1] Yet their proposals are an unmistakable proof that they held that view. Unless they had taken for granted that the Provinces had separate revenues and separate services, they could not be expected to have wasted their energies in directing as they did their efforts to getting redressed what appeared to them as a piece of injustice embodied in the unequal contributions made by the different Provinces form their revenues to the support of the Central Government.
If their view of the financial relationship between the Central and Provincial Governments was acceptable, then a good deal could not but have been conceded in favour of their criticisms and their proposals. Contributions, if the Imperial share could have been conceived of in such a light, as between the different Provinces whether in ratio to their revenues or population, were certainly unequal if calculated on the somewhat questionable but generally accepted hypothesis that all the revenues collected within a Province belonged to the Province.
1 Cf., however, Indian Expenditure Commission Minutes of Evidence, Vol. 3, Q. 18094, and Decentralization Commission Evidence, Vol. 2, Q. 9497.