WELFARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY OF WORKERS 341
relation to the other. The result is you have ad-hoc boards, ad- hoc reports, ad-hoc decisions which have to be dealt with ad-hoc. The result is there is always a disparity, always a divergence. Therefore the situation which we have at present is entirely the result of the faulty organisation, if I may say so, of the working classes of this country and particularly those who are employed under the Government of India. I think the House will agree that the decision which the Government of India has recently taken in the appointment of a Salaries Commission is a decision in the wise direction because the whole question of the wage stracture in this country and the relation of wages paid by the Government of India to its different classes of employees and the relation of wages paid to them to the wages operating in private industry, will be examined by this Commission. I hope that we shall be able to get some recommendations from this Commission from which we shall be able to establish in this country some kind of a uniformity in the wage system, so that everyone would know the underlying principles on which the wages arc based.
The other difficulty I find is that most of the employees of the Government of India, who arc employed in certain services which earn revenue, have come to regard that they have a first charge on the revenues of their Department. The railway employees think that because the railways are earning a profit, it is they who must get something, more than anybody else, out of the profits that the railways have earned. If the Postal employees find that the Postal Department has made a profit, they also raise a claim on the ground that their betterment, a rise in the standard of their living, should be regarded as a first charge on the revenues of that Department. Now, Sir, so far as I am concerned, I have not the slightest doubt that I cannot accept that position and I shall always resist it. The revenues earned by the Government of India—no matter whether they are raised by taxation or whether they are raised by any commercial undertaking—are the revenues of India. They are not the revenues of any particular class of people. They are not the revenues of any particular Department of Government of India. They are the revenues of the Government of India and the whole general public has a claim on those revenues and, as long as I am in charge of the Labour Department, I shall always resist any such claim made by any class of employees, namely, that because