268 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
“to leave each Province with a reasonable working surplus”— a surplus which it preferred “to calculate, so far as possible, with some relation to the general financial position of the Province and the more imminent claims upon its resources.”
“ To be able to comply with the requirements of leaving each Province with a surplus, and of inaugurating the new Councils without the necessity of resort to fresh taxation,”
the Committee deemed that the most equitable plan to be to take, not equal contributions as the Joint Report advised, [1] but unequal contributions from the surpluses of the Provinces liable to make them.
For the consummation of its plan the Committee held that the augmentation of Provincial Surpluses was an essential step. Without it, it deemed its task to be futile. The only way to augment the provincial surplus was to allocate some other source of Imperial revenue in addition to those already provincialized. To the provincialization of the income tax, a matter which was included in clause (d) of its terms of reference so far as Bombay was concerned, the Committee being impressed by the reasonings of the Joint Report, felt bound to oppose. As an alternative it recommended that General Stamps should be provincialized, as means of augmenting provincial surpluses, along with Judicial Stamps. The effect of this transfer of General Stamps from the allIndia list to the provincial list was to increase the provincial resources and diminish those of the Central Government. That deficit the Committee accepted as amounting in the year 1921-2 to ten crore, composed of six crores previously
1 The Report of the Financial Relations Committee seems to argue that the difference between its plan of levying contributions and that suggested in the Joint Report is a difference in the basis of the contributions ; its basis being that of “increased spending power”, while that of the Joint Report was “gross provincial surplus.” The Financial Repations Committee pointedly criticized the method proposed in the Joint Report to assess the contribution from each province “ as a percentage of difference between the gross provincial revenue and the gross provincial expenditure.” There does not seem to be much difference between that scheme and the scheme of the Committee consisting of a percentage levy on what is called increased spending power of the provinces under the new distribution of the revenues between the Central and Provincial Governments. That these two are different bases of assessment seems to be the general impression (cf. the speech of the Hon. Rai Bahadur Bakshi Sohan Lal on the Resolution re Provincial Contributions to the Central Exchequer, Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. III, No. 8, p. 508). This of course is an error; for spending power is simply another name for gross surplus. The change made by the Committee was in proposing unequal contribution in place of equal contribution. It kept unchanged the basis of the assessment.