DRAFT CONSTITUTION 519
was debated in this House and I do remember that I did say that such a provision might be necessary………*
Shri H. V. Kamath : May I remind Dr. Ambedkar of what exactly he said? I am reading from the official type-script of the Assembly Secretariat. These are his very words :
“If any person in the government of India has any opportunity of aggrandizing himself, it is either the Prime Minister or the Ministers of State and such a provision ought to have been imposed upon them for their tenure hut not upon the President.”
The Honourable Dr. B. R. Ambedkar : That is what I was saying. What I said was that such a provision might be necessary in the case of Ministers, and my Friend Mr. Kamath also read some section from the Factory Act requiring similar qualifications for a Factory Inspector. Now, Sir, the position that we have to consider is this : no doubt, this is a very laudable object, namely, that the Ministers in charge should maintain the purity of administration. I do not think anybody in this House can have any quarrel over that matter. We all of us are interested in seeing that the administration is maintained at a high level, not only of efficiency but also of purify. The question really is this? what ought to be the sanctions for maintaining that purity ? It seems to me there are two sanctions. One is this, namely, that we should require by law and by Constitution,—if this provision is to be effective—not only that the Ministers should make a declaration of ‘their’ assets and their liabilities at the time when they assume office, but we must also have two supplementary provisions. One is that every Minister on quitting office shall also make a declaration of his assets on the day on which he resigns, so that everybody who is interested in assessing whether the administration was Corrupt of not during the tenure of his office should be able to see what increase there is in the assets of the Minister and whether that increase can be accounted for by the savings which he can make out of his salary. The other provision would be that if we find that a Minister’s increases in his assets on the day on which he resigns are not explainable by the normal increases due to his savings, then there must be a third provision to charge the Minister for explaining how he managed to increase his assets to an abnormal degree during that period. In my judgment, if you want to make this clause effective, then there must be three provisions as I stated. One is a declaration at the outset; second is a declaration at the end of the quitting of this office; thirdly, responsibility for explaining as to how the assets have
*Dots in the original debates indicate interruption.