44 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
the proper thing for him would be to bring in a resolution before the House and say that all laws relating to insolvency may be abolished.
Shri Biswanath Das: May I state that I never said that the Insolvency Law is not necessary. All that I said is this law is unnecessary, undesirable and breeds immorality into society.
The Honourable Dr. B. R. Ambedkar: Yes, therefore not necessary. However with regard to the point made by Dr. Punjabrao Deshmukh he is not here—I was somewhat surprised when he said that the Bill ought to be circulated. He has accepted a place on the Select Committee and I am sure about it that the two positions are quite inconsistent. I do not wish to say anything more about what he has said.
With regard to the point Shrimati Durgabai, namely that the Bill should have retrospective effect, I was bound to make a reference to it because I had induced her to withdraw her own Bill on a promise that when I bring my Bill I will say something about her Bill also. But as to the substance of it, as I say I feel a certain amount of doubt and difficulty, and I cannot very readily say in this House that I shall accept the proposition that the Bill should have retrospective effect. In fact one of the friends on the bench there who spoke said something which has a great deal of force and we must be very careful in giving retrospective effect to a measure of this sort.
Now coming to the point made by my friend Professor Ranga—he of course has the habit of entering into subjects which undoubtedly he himself will acknowledge are not his own—I am prepared to modify his argument and to give it some sort of a shape so that it might appear respectable. Now if I understand correctly, what he said was that there was a difference between the Presidency Towns Insolvency Act and the Provincial Insolvency Act, inasmuch as one contained a clause or a section like 6 and 52 while the other did not.
One could infer from what he said that the legislature in passing the law had different intensions from the very beginning that while they intended that since interest must pass to the Official Assignee under section 52 when the father