LyrArc Insights

Gandhi in Young India, 1923- Its Relevance to Poverty and Development 100 Years Later

Mohandas Gandhi had the foresight and wisdom to focus on the main issue facing India of the great poverty of the country. Vivekananda also grasped this fact. Dadabhai Naoroji's book "Poverty and UnBritish Rule in India" was published in 1901 in London. This book documented in detail over two decades British budgets in India that drained the country's wealth and created a built-in poverty. Gandhi throroughly studied both Vivekananda and Naoroji's writings. It had mainly to do with the wrongs of expenditure of the money coming from taxpayers not being invested to improve the quality of living of the people. Its relevance is that even after the first local self government ministries setup by 1935 other sources of drainage of the country's resources and wealth through illicit money, corruption, continue to drain the country's resources down to the present day in some states in India, leading to inbuilt poverty and lack of development as in British days. For the first time good governance and clean governance, and development through rapid pooling together of resources of land, investment capital, human skill resources and technologies, is now seen as the Priority No. 1 for India.  No. 1 of Young India, Financial and Economic Supplement, May 1923, by Mohandas Gandhi, is devoted to this question with the title- "Wrongs of Indian Expenditure."  

Even after able and enlightened administrators beginning with Irishman Lord Mayo in 1868 who pushed for such changes in Ireland before arriving in India as Governor General, made efforts to bring better living conditions to India, much of the ensuing 50 years were devoted to military expenditures taking over half of the budget. As Gandhi states here for the Indian Budget for the year 1923-24- "In this total of Rupees 130 odd crores, there is not an outlay equivalent of one in a hundred which could be at all regarded as productive or profitable. Fifty percent are taken for the unmitigated waste of the Army charges. The Railway Debt and the interest thereon may have a semblance of profitability."

On the approaching 100th anniversary of this issue it is shown here in full. Because it is not readily available from the internet, it was written down from a photo of the original taken at the Gandhi Ashram museum in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, on a visit there in 2017.

"In every modern civilized community the outlay of funds, collected by contributions from the taxpayer in a variety of forms, calls for the liveliest interest from taxpayers, and demands the greatest carefulness from the authorites entrusted with the outlay. In theory, at least, the layout of these monies must be, like the a sowing of the seed by the farmer, in the hope and with the intention that it would be returned a hundredfold to the sower. But this supreme principle of public expenditure seems never to have been learnt by the Government of India Individual Administrators, it may be, may have occasionally lapsed into lucid intervals, and made perfunctory protests for readjustment of expenditures. But even while their demand was being framed, they must have known that the higher authorites, disposing like the Gods above, of the fortunes of India, were not in the least likely to attend to any soppy sentimentality. Effusions like the following, could have appeared in no other light to the "superior" mentality of Whitehall :-

Though the financial necessities of the hour have brought more prominently to your view the enormous cost of our Army (16.3 crores rupees) as compared with the resources of the country, I cannot describe the fiscal difficulties as the main reason for the course we have taken. I consider that if our condition in this respect was most prosperous, we should still not be justified in not spending one shilling more than can be shown to be absolutely and imperatively necessary. There are considerations of a far higher nature involved in this matter than the annual exigencies of finance, or the interests of those who are employed in the military service of the Crown. Every shilling that is taken for unnecessary military expenditure is taken from those vast sums that it is our duty to spend for the moral and material improvement of the people." (Lord Mayo's minute, 3rd October 1870).

This is an excellent sentiment- on paper, Lord Mayo omitted to say on what he considered to be the imperatively necessary military expenditure for this country for its own needs. His successors have taken care not to recall, and much less to rectify,  the omission. We are not however, in this instance, concerned with the specific wrongs of the Indian military expenditure. We need only point out that what in every other civilized country is accepted as the one sovereign principle in the adjustment of public expenditure is either unknown to the present administrators in India, or being known, is systematically ignored in the interest of "Enlightened selfishness."

Military expenditure is indeed, the largest and commonest item to be singled out for purpose of illustration. But a brief scrutiny of every item in the Budget of the Government of India today would reveal the fact that there is not a single instance, in which the principle of returning the taxpayers monies, directly or indirectly, is even nominally observed. Take for example, the following summary, of the following summary of the principal channels of our public expenditures as given in the Budget of 1923-24:-

Direct Demand on the Revenues           Rs 5.30 crores

Railways Interest and Miscellaneous.    Rs. 27.91 crores

Irrigation                                                 Rs.   0.14 crores

Posts and Telegraphs                             Rs.  0.56 crores

Debt Services                                         Rs. 17.21 crores

Civil Administration                                 Rs. 10.46 crores

Currency Mint and Exchange                 Rs.   1.13 crores

Civil Works                                               Rs. 1.87 crores

Miscellaneous                                          Rs.  5.21 crores

Military Services                                       Rs. 64.81 crores

Miscellaneous adjustments                      Rs.   0.03 crores

Less Lump Sum Reduction ordered         Rs.   4.00 crores

TOTAL EXPENDITURE                             Rs. 130.40 crores