India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947; India -- Politics and government -- 1765-1947
"Let us now explain how we contemplate in future that the
executive Governments of the provinces shall be constituted. As we
have seen, three provinces are now governed by a Governor and an
Executive Council of three members, of whom one is in practice an
Indian and two are usually appointed from the Indian Civil
Service, although the law says only that they must be qualified by
twelve years' service under the Crown in India. One province,
Bihar and Orissa, is administered by a Lieutenant-Governor with a
council of three constituted in the same way. The remaining five
provinces, that is to say, the three Lieutenant-Governorships of
the United Provinces, the Punjab and Burma and the Chief
Commissionerships of the Central Provinces and Assam are under the
administration of a single official Head. We find throughout India
a very general desire for the extension of Council government....
Our first proposition, therefore, is that in all these provinces
singleheaded administration must cease and be replaced by
collective administration.
"In determining the structure of the Executive we have to bear in
mind the duties with which it will be charged. We start with the
two postulates; the complete responsibility for the government
cannot be given immediately without inviting a breakdown, and that
some responsibility must be given at once if our scheme is to have
any value. We have defined responsibility as consisting primarily
in amenability to constituents, and in the second place in
amenability to an assembly. We do not believe that there is any
way of satisfying these governing conditions other than by making
a division of the functions of the Government, between those which
may be made over to popular control and those which for the
present must remain in official hands.... We may call these the
'reserved' and 'transferred' subjects respectively. It then
follows that for the management of these two categories there must
be some form of executive body, with a legislative organ in
harmony with it....
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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