THE NATURE OF THE CHANGE 263
regarded as merely a financial expedient but are, and so long as they survive will be, viewed as a means of going behind the provincial government to the Government of India, that we feel sure that they should be abolished. We propose therefore to make land revenue together with irrigation wholly provincial receipts. It follows that the Provinces will become entirely liable for expenditure on famine relief and protective irrigation works……The one remaining head is income tax. We see two very strong reasons for making this an Indian receipt. First, there is the necessity of maintaining a uniform rate throughout the country. The inconveniences, particularly to the commercial world, of having different rates in different Provinces are manifest. Secondly, in the case of ramifying enterprises with their business centre in some big city, the Province in which the tax is paid is not necessarily the Province in which income is earned. We have indeed been told that income tax is merely the industrial or professional complement of the land revenue ; and that to provincialize the latter, while Indianizing the former, means giving those provinces whose wealth is more prominently agricultural, such as the United Provinces and Madras, an initial advantage over a Province like Bombay, which has very large commercial and industrial interests. Another very practical argument is that the tax is collected by provincial agency and that if Provincial Governments are given no inducement, such as a share of the receipts or a commission on the collections which is only such a share in disguise, there will be a tendency to slackness in collection and a consequent falling off in receipts. We admit that these arguments have force; but we are not prepared to let them stand in the way of a complete separation of revenues. Equality of treatment as between one Province and another must be reached so far as it is possible in the settlements as a whole, and it is
is presented to the Governor for his assent, if the Bill appears to the Governor to contain provisions—
( e ) affecting the land revenue of a Province either so as to
(i) prescribe a period or periods within which any temporary settled estate or estates may not be re-assessed to land revenue, or
(ii) limit the extent to which the assessment to land revenue of such an estate or estates may be made or enhanced, or
(iii) modify materialy the general principles upon which land revenue has hitherto been assessed, if such prescription, limitation or modification appears to the Governor to be likely seriously to affect the public revenues of the province.