866 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
municipality that somebody is dead though an official permission is necessary for the purpose of either burying him or burning him. My own experience has been that we often carried the dead body to the graveyard, and there was some sort of insignificant clerk to whom we paid four annas and who gave us a counterfoil of a ticket saying: “All right, you have brought the dead body and you can either bury or burn it as may be the custom prevalent amongst you”. I do not know the party to whom this particular certificate—what may be called the death certificate—may be of any use, except to take it to the mill manager and say: “So-and-so is dead: I am his relative, and I want the balance of wages that are lying in your hand”. I have no idea whether the clerk who stays in the burial ground reports the matter to the municipality or not that so-and-so was dead, and his dead body was brought there, and was either cremated or buried. That is the condition of the register of births and deaths in this country.
I submit, Sir, that it would be very difficult for the authorities who are created under this Act to go about hunting every nook and corner to find out who is dead. In England, the operation of the estate duty law becomes simple for the simple reason that there everybody dies after making a will and so far as that is concerned, some one has to take what is called a ‘probate’ so that all the Inland Revenue Officers— as they are called in England—who operate the internal tax system have only to go to the Registrar of the High Court in order to find out whether any application has been made for a probate. If so, from that they can find out who is dead, what is the total estate that has been disclosed in that application. But, unfortunately, in our country, we have not got the habit of obtaining a probate. No doubt, there is a rule that, so far as the Indian Succession Act goes, a probate shall be taken, if there is a will, under the Probate Act. If a party is not governed by the Indian Succession Act, all the same, a party can obtain a probate on a will, if any will is left, under what is called the Probate Administration Act. We have got no such system at all here. I have been wondering at myself, if my hon. Friend appointed me as Controller of the Estate Duty under this Bill, what I would do, where would I go to