218 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
derangement. The third point of inter-relationship necessitated that the Provincial Governments should work within the grants as fixed finally by the Government of India. To have allowed the Provincial Governments the liberty to exceed the grants because they had ample balances to their credit would have been incompatible [1] with the responsibility of the Imperial Government to provide the ways and means for the whole administration of the country. A provincial balance, it was pointed out, was not a separate balance locked up in a separate provincial chest. It was a part of the general balances on which the Government of India operated daily. If a sudden demand uncontemplated in the Budget were to be made upon these balances, as would have been the case if the Provincial Governments had exceeded their budget grants, it would have disturbed the ways and means transaction and would have involved the Government into insolvency by causing insufficiency of cash.
All these defences of the restrictions on Provincial Governments were plausible defences and could have been decisive if the centralized system of administration in favour of which they were urged could be deemed to have satisfied the ends of good government. But it was not unreasonable to argue as was done by the Provincial Governments [2] that modern tendencies were all moving in the direction of forms of government which placed fullest powers as low down in the administrative scale (i.e. as near the section of population immediately affected) as could be safely arranged. It is reasonable to centralize such powers as could not be efficiently exercised otherwise. But it is equally unreasonable to centralize powers where central control or uniformity is not clearly essential or is impracticable. By centralization all progress tends to be retarded, all initiative liable to be checked and the sense of responsibility of Local Authorities greatly impaired. Besides, centralization involves and must involve a serious sacrifice of elasticity, for it is naturally disagreeable to a central department to have to deal with half a dozen different ways of managing the same branch of administration, and which therefore aims at reducing all types to one. Further centralization conflicts with what may be regarded as a cardinal principle of good government, namely, that when administrative business reached an authority fully competent to deal with it, that authority should deal with it finally. Even when
1 R.C.D., Mit. of Evid, Vol. X, Q. 44865.
2 In this connection see the very trenchant memorandum by the Government of Bombay on Decentralization, R. C. D., Mit. of Evid., Vol. VIII, Appendix II.