Budget Comments
THERE was one continued and ceaseless struggle on the part of the Finance Department of the Government of India to maintain at all risks and hazards a ‘strong financial position' in the face of a rapidly changing situation, and provide by anticipation against all possible dangers near and remote, fancied and real: and not a year passed - literally speaking — but heralded some change in the financial arrangements of the country.
Such continuous piling up of tax on tax, and such ceaseless adding to the burdens of a suffering people, is probably without precedent in the annals of finance.
The desirability of raising the exemption limit of the income-tax has been frequently admitted on behalf of Government, and, amongst others by the Finance Minister.
In India public revenues are administered under no sense of responsibility to the governed. A severe economy, a rigorous retrenchment of expenditure in all branches of the Administration, consistently of course, with the maintenance of a proper standard of efficiency, ought always to be the most leading feature — the true governing principle — of Indian finance, the object being to keep the level of public taxation as low as possible, so as to leave the springs of national industry free play and room for unhampered movement.
It is the finance of a country, which is not only ‘poor, very poor', but the bulk of whose population is daily growing poorer under the play of the economic forces.
Indian finance seems now to be entering upon a new and important phase, and the time has come when Government should take advantage of the comparative freedom, which the country at present enjoys from the storm and stress of the past, to devote its main energies to a vigorous and statesmanlike effort for the promotion of the material and moral interests of the people.
I would earnestly press upon the attention of Government the necessity of making Education a National charge, so that the same attention which is at present bestowed by the Government on matters connected with the Army Services and Railway expansion might also be bestowed on the education of our people. Under present arrangements, Education is a Provincial charge and the Provincial Governments and Administrations have made over Primary Education to local bodies whose resources are fixed and limited. No serious expansion of educational efforts is under such arrangements possible.
In other countries, national education is held to be one of the most solemn duties of the State, and no effort or money is spared to secure for the rising generations the best equipment possible for the business of life. Here it has so far been a more or less neglected branch of State duty, relegated to a subordinate position in the general scheme of State action.
A larger portion of our revenues than at present should be devoted to objects on which the moral and material well-being of the mass of our people intimately depends. The expenditure on the Army, the Police and similar services may be necessary, but it is a necessary evil, and consistently with the maintenance of a proper standard of efficiency, it must be kept down as far as possible. On the other hand, no State, especially in these days, can expend too much on an object like education. And here, I regret to say that the Government is not doing its duty to the people of India.
The treatment of sanitation, as though the Government had no responsibility in regard to it, has hitherto been one of the most melancholy features of the present scheme of financial decentralisation, under which sanitation has been made over to local bodies as their concern, though they have admittedly no resources for undertaking large projects of improvement.
What one regrets most, however, in the present system of administration is that it favours so largely a policy of mere drift. The actual work of administration is principally in the hands of members of the Civil Service, who, taken as a body, are able and conscientious men; but none of them individually can command that prestige, which is so essential for inaugurating any large scheme of policy involving a departure from the established order of things.
In India the taxpayer has no constitutional voice in the shaping of these things. If we had any votes to give, and the Government of the country had been carried on by an alternation of power between two parties, both alike anxious to conciliate us and bid for our support, the Hon'ble Member (FM) would assuredly have told a different tale.
There is no Indian problem, be it of population or education or labour or subsistence, which it is not in the power of statesmanship to solve.
The India of the future will, under Providence, not be an India of diminishing plenty, of empty prospect, or of justifiable discontent; but one of expanding industry awakened faculties, of increasing prosperity, and of more widely distributed comfort and wealth. I have faith in the conscience and purpose of my own country, and I believe in the almost illimitable capacities of this.
Do they look familiar? These comments are extracted from the speeches made by Gopal Krishna Gokhale in Budget debates in the years 1902 to 1907 - yes, more than a hundred years ago. Things seem to have remained pretty same.
In one of his speeches, Gokhale mentions an interesting information - In the Customs Department there are 41 appointments, with salaries ranging from Rs. 260 to Rs. 2,250; not a single one among them is held by an Indian! Imagine a Customs officer getting a salary of Rs. 2250 in 1902!