Mr. President, Sir, honourable and responsible persons who were entrusted with the framing of the new Constitution should take into consideration the past experience so that the past defects may be remedied in the present Constitution. It is with this end in view that several Members of any province as well as from elsewhere spoke at length on the inequity and the injustice which was done under the past Constitution so far as provinces like Assam and Orissa were concerned; but Sir. I need not repeat or allude to those things in my present speech. I would only ask honourable Members of this House to remember that the justice which we had expected by an amendment of article 253 or 254-that expectation has gone in vain, and now we are left to this article 255. If 255 were worded in a different way, it might help provinces like Assam and Orissa. As it stands it even now rests with the Parliament whether any money would be allocated to any province in need of such money or not. Of course this article enables the Parliament to give sufficient grant to the provinces which are in need of it but it does not make it compulsory on the part of Parliament to make such grant. The Parliament is composed of members of different provinces, and each member is under some obligation or has given some sort of assurance that the concern of his province will be his first concern; and now therefore if in a tussle between different provinces the Parliament is not persuaded to give a grant to any particular province, or in an emergence the Parliament decides not to make any grant to any particular province and it confines the grants to richer provinces, what will be the fate of Bihar, Orissa and Assam that stand in absolute need of grant from the Centre ? I would therefore ask honourable Members who are in charge of the framing of this Constitution to give special attention to this aspect of the question whether the provinces who are admittedly in need of grants can expect or would be entitled to expect that some grant should always be made to them in order to meet their needs. Under the old article 142 of the Government of India Act the Government at the Centre has always been giving some grant to the Provinces, and so if it is treated as a matter of convention and if the words in 255 really mean ‘shall’, then I have nothing to say. But if this article leaves the option to Parliament even not to grant a province which maybe in need of that grant, then I would most respectfully protest against the present phraseology of this article.
