Sir, I referred the other day to that bureaucratic document that the Government of India in Finance Department placed before the Sarker Expert Committee. The Government of India attained by then independence though it was only five months old. The Finance Department produced an autocratic, bureaucratic document which is colourless and heartless and without any conception of the sovereign -duties that developed on the Finance Ministry, because it has conserved all sources of revenue in its own hands-not by its own efforts butthrough the system of centralised rule that it inherited from the former British Raj. My idea of independence is over and I do not dream of independence. I do not breathe in the atmosphere of independence today. Sir, accidentally, circumstantially we have become part of a Commonwealth and one is ashamed to open daily papers-whether Indian or British papers–India is part of that Commonwealth Empire and India must follow the doctrine of the United Kingdom by handing over all its economic resources. Today our resources are subordinated to British economic policy and we do not find the spokesman of the Finance Ministry present here to explain his functions or to explain the attitude of the Government of India. Sir, the document I referred to is the memorandum which the Finance Department produced before the Sarker Committee and it gives an analysis of revenues and expenditures for ten years on page 4. It says that the revenues of the Government of India were 1968 crores, civil expenditure 1731 crores, defence expenditure 1887 crores. We know how the huge defence expenditure was met. It was met from the borrowings and it has added up to the unproductive size of the public debt but in para 8 on page 3 they say, I mean the Finance Department–I will not say the Finance Ministry as it did not understand the functions of Finance Ministry then or even now-that in these ten years it helped the provinces to the extent of 196.7 crores, and it says in spite of its own heavy commitments the Centre released nearly 200 crores of rupees to the provinces during this period. It shows the bureaucratic mentality and spirit of the Finance Department and we see no change in it after one and a half years when that document was written; and yet let me analyse it. In 1937-38 the annual revenue of the Centre was 86 crores; in 1946-47 it was 336 crores; and in 1949-50 it is 325 crores. These revenues the Government of India did not manufacture themselves. They get it from the people of India and yet it grudges the 200 crores which means out of 1968 crores it is only 10 per cent. It gave 10 per cent of the revenues collected during these ten years to the provinces and it grudges it.
