Mr. President, Sir, the passing of the previous articles of the Draft Constitution so far as financial provisions are concerned, has passed the death sentence upon all hopes and aspirations of the provinces, not merely of the backward and poor provinces but also of all the richer provinces. I say this after going through the memoranda that were submitted to the Expert Financial Committee presided over by Mr. N. R. Sarkar, the present acting Premier of Bengal. If anybody had cared to go through this volume which was supplied by the Assembly Office, they must have noticed that every one of the provinces, whether their income was three crores or fifty crores, wanted a revision of the divisible pool of Income-tax. They wanted that Corporation Tax should be included in the divisible pool of Income-tax. They recommended that all excise duties on commodities produced in a particular province and all export duties should also be brought on the divisible pool. The “tale of woe“-in the phrase of Dr. Ambedkar-which the representatives from Assam have been placing before the House is nothing new as I will show by giving references from these memoranda that even the richest province in the Dominion of India-I mean Madras-wanted all these things which Assam representatives wanted the Centre to give.
