THE NATURE OF PROVINCIAL FINANCE 207
which varied in amount with variations in the yield of the Assigned or Shared Revenues. But all the same it was a supply of funds and nothing more. It is even incorrect to say that the Government of India gave funds to the Provincial Governments for meeting the expenditure on the services the responsibility for which was undertaken by them. As a matter of fact, the receiving as well as the disbursing of all public money, including the provincial portion of it, remained in the hands of the Government of India. The only proper expression, if it is to be true to facts, would be to say that Provincial Finances simply meant that the Government of India opened a Provincial Services Account in its Treasury books which varied with the yield of the Assigned or Shared Revenues and on which and to its extent only the Provincial Governments were permitted to draw.
Thus there was a complete aggregation of the sources of revenue in the hands of the Government of India. From this fact it follows that instead of the Provinces contributing from their funds it was the Government of India which distributed the yield of its taxes among the Provinces. The situation could not be otherwise. For it should be recalled that in virtue of the Act of 1833 the financial responsibility for the services undertaken to subserve the ends of peace, order and good government rested upon the Government of India. While some of the services were administered directly by the Government of India, owing to the well-nigh impossibility of managing directly from a central bureau the affairs of a country as vast as the continent of Europe minus Russia, many of the services attaching to the Imperial Government were left to be administered under its supervision by the Provincial Government. The weak point of the situation, as has been remarked, consisted in the fact that the administrative and financial responsibility did not rest on one and the same authority as should have been the case. On the other hand at the end of every financial year all Provincial Governments sent in their estimates of the charges for the services they administered to the Government of India in the Financial Department, leaving the obligation of refusing, curtailing or granting the supply asked for to the Government of India to discharge as best it could. Not having the obligation to