46 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
behalf of the Central Stationery Office. The House will bear in mind that we had entered into a contract with the paper mills for supplying us 25,900 tons. If the House will enter into a little arithmetic, it will be found that as a result of our calculations for the first six months it was found that we had only 9,000 tons to get under our contract from the paper mills and had to run six months yet. Consequently, what the Government did was this. The Government revised its estimate in the light of the circumstances that had been disclosed during the previous six months. The second thing that the Government did was to consolidate the method of requisitioning paper, and here I would like to tell the House that before the order was passed there were two methods by which demands for paper on behalf of Government were put forth. One way was the Central Stationery Office demand, which was a demand on behalf of the Central Government, and the provinces of Bengal, Orissa, Assam, and the North-West Frontier Province and the Central Provinces. The other was the non-Central Stationery office demand, made on behalf of what are technically called the Non-C.S.O. provinces, i.e. the provinces, who presented their demands independently of the Central Stationery Office, plus Indian States, Security Printing, Supply Department, and non-State Railways. It was found that these two independent methods of requisitioning paper for Government created a great deal of difficulty in arriving at an accurate estimate of the total demand for paper, and consequently the first step that was taken was to consolidate these two channels of demand into one single channel, and the whole matter is now concentrated in the hands of the Central Stationery Office.
As I told the House previously, when the situation was found to have grown somewhat perilous on account of the excessive use of paper, and practically overdrawing over the contract amount, we revised the estimates and centralised the demands, and the position at the end of October worked out to these figures :
Tons
The Central Stationery Office demand for the next six months, i.e. from
October 10 March 1943 was fixed at ... ... 32,000
The Non-Central Stationery Office demand was fixed at ... ... 9,500
Together the total came to ... 41,500