THE NATURE OF THE CHANGE 249
expenditure. Owing to this rule, the committee had to drop proposals which involved recurring expenditure, but which were desirable from its standpoint. On the other hand, similar proposals made by the Executive could be easily carried through by the device freely adopted of obtaining previous sanction of the Government of India. The consequence was that in all the Provincial Budgets presented under the new rules the amount of this “unallotted” fund left to the discretion of the committee bore too insignificant a proportion to the total expenditure in the budget to make the Provincial Executive in any real degree amenable to the Provincial legislature.
No really responsible government could, however, be introduced in the provinces without first of all making a complete change in the mutual relations between the Central Government and the different Provincial Governments in India. The relation between the two which existed before the passing of the Act of 1919 was one of complete subordination of provincial Governments to the Central Government. [1] In this bond of subordination we can discern three strands—legislative, financial, and administrative. Of these three we have seen how tight was the financial strand. The Government of India’s control over revenues and expenditure was derived from Parliamentary Statutes which treated the revenues of India as one and applied them to the purposes of the Government of India as a whole. It is true that this provision was not so strictly construed as absolutely to prevent the appropriation of particular sources of income to specific purposes all-India or provincial. Or else the development of the provincial system of finance would have been impossible. But it certainly had the effect of denying to Provincial Governments any inherent legal right to the revenues which they raised. The Government of India completely controlled taxation imposed in British India, apart from the local taxes which were raised by local bodies. Taxation could only be levied by law, [2] but the law had forbidden a Provincial Legislature, without the previous sanction of the Government of India, to consider
“any law affecting the public debt of India or the customs duties or any other tax or duty for the time being in force and imposed by the authority of the Governor-General in Council for the general purposes of the Government of India.”
1 Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, Cd. 9109 of 1918, Ch. V.
2 There is, however, a glaring exception. The land revenue in India has been raised without any legislative sanction. The exclusion of land revenue from the province of the legislature practically removed between 40 and 50 per cent. of the net public revenue from any sort of control.