Vol. 6 · pages 611–615

596 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES silver currency as may prove necessary. The Government should continue to give rupees for gold, but fresh rupees should not be coined until the proportion of gold in the currency is found to exceed the requirements of the public. We also recommend that any profit on the coinage of rupees should not be credited to the revenue or held as a portion of the ordinary balance of the Government of India, but should be kept in gold as a special reserve, entirely apart from the paper-currency reserve and the ordinary Treasury balances” [and be made freely available for foreign remittances whenever the exchange falls below specie point.] Taking the two recommendations of the Committee together, where is the departure ? What the Government has done is precisely what the Committee had recommended. That the Government of India or the Chamberlain Commission should have admitted for a moment that there was a departure is not a little odd, for the very despatch which conveyed the Minute of Sir Edward Law to the Secretary of State opens with remarks which show that Government was earnestly following the recommendations of the Fowler Committee. It runs:— “In our despatch No. 301 of August 24, 1899, we wrote with reference to paragraph 60 of the Report of the Indian Currency Committee [i.e. the Fowler Committee], that any profit made on rupee coinage should be held in gold as a special reserve, has not escaped our attention ; but the need for the coinage of additional rupees is not likely to occur for some time, and a decision on this point may be conveninently deferred.” What Sir Edward Law did was to carry that recommendation into effect when the occasion arrived. In view of this it is useless to belabour the Government of India if the ideal of a gold standard with a gold currency was defeated by the coinage of rupees. But, even though the Government has in ignorance taken the blame on itself, it cannot be rightly thrown at its door. If the project has been defeated by the coinage of rupees, the question must be referred to the Fowler Committe. Why did the Committee permit the coinage of rupees ? There is no direct answer, but it may be guessed. It seems the Committee first decided that there should be a gold standard and a gold currency as desired by the Government of India. But then they seemed to have been worried by the question whether in the

597A RETURN TO THE GOLD STANDARD ideal they had sketched they had made enough provision for the maintenance of the gold value of the rupee. In the view of the opponents of the Government of India the rupee ought to have been made either convertible as a bank note or a limited legal tender as a shilling. The Committee rejected both these demands as being unnecessary. Stating their ground for refusing to reduce the rupee to the status of a shilling, the Committee argued*:— “It is true that in the United Kingdom the silver currency has a fixed limit of 40s., beyond which it cannot be used to pay a debt …… While it cannot be denied that 40s. limitation tends to emphasize and maintain the subsidiary character of our silver coinage, yet the essential factor in maintaining those tokens at their representative nominal value is not the statutory limit on the amount for which they are a legal tender in any one payment, but the limitation of their total issue. Provided the latter restriction is adequate, there is no essential reason why there need be any limit on the amount for which tokens are a tender by law.” Regarding the necessity for convertibility the Committee observed†:— “Outside the United Kingdom there are two principal instances of countries with a gold standard and currency, which admit silver coins to unlimited tender. These countries are France and the United States of Amercia. In France the five-franc piece is an unlimited tender and for all internal purposes is equivalent to gold. The same remark applies in the United States to the silver dollar …… Both in France and the United States the Mints are now closed to the coinage of silver coins of ultimated tender. In neither country are such coins convertible by law into gold ; in both countries alike they are equivalent to gold for all internal purposes. For international payments, so far as specie is concerned, France and the United States depend ultimately on the international medium of exchange, which is gold. In the last resort, it is their gold which, acting through the foreign exchanges, maintains the whole mass of their currency at its nominal value for internal purposes. * Report, par. 56. † Report, pars. 57-60.

598 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES “The position of the currency question in India being such as we have explained in the preceding paragraph, we do not consider it necessary to recommend a different policy in the case of that country from that which is found sufficient in France and the United States, by imposing a legal obligation on the Government of India to give gold for rupees, or, in other words, to substitute the former for the latter on the demand of the holders. This obligation would impose on the Government of India a liability to find gold at a moment’s notice to an amount which cannot be defined beforehand, and the liability is one which, in our opinion, ought not to be accepted.” Although confident of its opinions, the Committee was considerably impressed by those who, owing to the large quantity of rupees in circulation, entertained doubts “whether the mere closing of the Indian Mints to silver would in practice be attended with such a restriction of the rupee currency as would make the rupee permanently exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate.” So much was the Committee shaken by these doubts that it admitted that* “the forces which affect the gold value of the rupee are complicated and obscure in their mode of operation, and we are unable, therefore, to say positively that the mere closing of the Mints to silver will, in practice, lead to such a limitation of the rupee currency, relatively to the demands for it, as will make the rupee permanently exchangeable for gold at a fixed rate.” As a remedy against such a contingency the Committee thought that the Government of India should accept the obligation of convertibility of the rupee into gold for foreign remittances whenever the rupee fell below specie point. Having hit upon such a simple solution the next question was how was the Government to get its gold reserve ? Borrowing for the purposes of such a gold reserve was one way of doing it. But that project was somehow unpalatable to the Committee. Perhaps because * Report, par. 58.

599A RETURN TO THE GOLD STANDARD it had admonished the Government, in another part of its Report,* to “husband the resources at their command, exercise a resolute economy, and restrict the growth of their gold obligations,” or because it was a vicious principle to borrow “for the establishment or the maintenance of a gold standard,”† the Committee was averse to the proposal for gold borrowing. But if a gold reserve was not to be built up by borrowing, how could it be built up otherwise ? The Committee seems to have been considerably troubled over the problem of finding an alternative mode of raising a reserve until some member of it, probably at a moment when his intellect was rather weak, proposed ‘Well, why not allow the Governments to coin rupees ? If that were allowed it could easily build up a gold reserve without having to borrow, and can then discharge the obligation of convertibility for foreign remittances.’ So innocuous seemed the proposal that the Committee wholeheartedly adopted and incorporated it into its Report with a certain sigh of relief that is unmistakable from the firm language in which it was expressed. This may or may not be a correct interpretation of the reasoning employed by the Committee in permitting the Government to coin rupees. But the fact remains that the Committee did not realize what was involved in that recommendation. First of all, what was to happen to the gold standard and currency if the coinage of rupees was to go on ? In this regard is it possible to have more respect for a Committee which lays down on the one hand the ideal of a gold standard and currency, and permits on the other hand the coinage of rupees, than Bagehot felt for the Directors of the Bank of England, who on March 25, 1819, passed that notorious resolution :— “That the Court cannot refrain from adverting to an opinion, strongly insisted upon by some, that the Bank has only to reduce its issues to obtain a favourable turn in the Exchanges, and a consequent influx of the precious metals; the Court conceives it to be its duty to declare that it is unable to discover any solid foundation for such a sentiment.” * Report, par. 70. † See the Reservations to the Report by Campbell Holland and Muir Report, p. 27.

600 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES If the opinions of the Directors were classical for their nonsense, are those of the Fowler Committee less so ? Is there any difference between them ? Bagehot, in commenting upon the sentiments embodied in the resolution, not dissimilar to the recommendations of the Fowler Committee, urged some extenuating circumstances which compel us to forgive the Bank Directors their nonsense. The Directors lived in an age when economic reasoning was in a confused state ; nor were they anxious for the “influx of gold,” being perfectly satisfied with paper. None of these circumstances can excuse the nonsense of the Fowler Committee. They framed their recommendations at a time when the contrary of what the Bank Directors had held was an established axiom. Besides, it cannot be said that they were not anxious for the influx of gold into the Indian currency. On the other hand, that was just the thing they were looking forward to. Consequently, they should have carefully weighed their words and allowed nothing that was inconsistent with their main object. In not paying sufficient heed to that elementary principle known as Gresham’s Law, the Committee not only made a fool of itself but defeated the principal object it had set forth in the earlier part of its Report. Secondly, was it necessary to endow the Government with a power to coin rupees ? What was the nature of the problem the Committee was called upon to decide ? Let us re-state it. The Herschell Committee,* by way of modifying the proposals of the Government of India, submitted to it in 1892, had introduced a proviso by which the Mints, although closed to the public, were to remain open to the Government for the coinage of rupees—a proviso which, by the way, reveals that after all that imposing survey the Committee remained supremely ignorant of the secret why, in the monetary systems it investigated, the currency maintained its parity with gold with little or no gold. If it had understood that it was limitation of issue which maintained this parity it would not have introduced the proviso which it did. However pernicious the proviso, the Committee must be excused for that indiscretion, for it was afraid that owing to the Mint closure there might be a sudden contraction of currency, and as it had not made gold general * See Chap. IV, supra, p. 471.