Enforcement Officer / Accounts Officer (EO/AO) 2017 recruitment test. Transcribed from the Commission's own booklet (series A, GRS-A-TNS); answer as per the official UPSC final answer key. This question is in Part B. Answer last reviewed 24 August 2026.

Who is the author of the work, The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India : A Study in the Provincial Decentralization of Imperial Finance?

(a)Dadabhai Naoroji
(b)Dr. B. R. Ambedkar
(c)M. N. Roy
(d)Jawaharlal Nehru

Answer

Why

Correct — B, (b) Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India : A Study in the Provincial Decentralization of Imperial Finance grew out of the doctoral research Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar did in economics at Columbia University, and it was published in London in 1925 — a decade before the political work the name is now remembered for. Read the title as a description of its subject and the item almost answers itself: it is a study in public finance, and specifically of how the Government of India, which after the Charter Act of 1833 controlled every head of revenue and every rupee of expenditure from the centre, was pushed by administrative necessity into handing parts of that control to the provinces. Ambedkar takes the story from that wholly centralised starting point through Lord Mayo’s resolution of 1870, which gave each province a lump sum and a budget of its own to manage, and on through the settlements that followed, in which whole heads of revenue were first assigned to the provinces outright and later shared between province and centre. His argument is that this decentralisation was never a concession to self-government: it was a device for controlling expenditure, and the provinces were given the responsibility of spending long before they were given any voice in raising. Of the four men on the option list only Ambedkar wrote as a trained academic economist holding a doctorate in the subject, and this is the technical monograph of an economist, not the polemic of a publicist or the memoir of a politician.

Why the others are wrong

(a)Dadabhai Naoroji — Dadabhai Naoroji did write on imperial finance, which is what makes him the strongest wrong answer here, but not this book. His case is made in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), which collects three decades of papers arguing the drain of wealth — that a part of India’s annual product left the country every year as Home Charges, remittances and the salaries and pensions of Europeans, and never returned as capital. He put the same case to the Welby Commission on Indian expenditure in the 1890s, of which he was a member. The distinction to hold on to is one of genre and level: Naoroji argued about the transfer of resources from India to Britain, while this work analyses the internal division of finance between the Government of India and its provinces.
(c)M. N. Roy — M. N. Roy — Manabendra Nath Roy — was a revolutionary and a communist theorist, not a public-finance scholar. He helped found the Communist Party of Mexico, founded the emigre Communist Party of India at Tashkent in 1920, argued with Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International over the colonial thesis, and wrote India in Transition (1922); in his last phase he abandoned communism for Radical Humanism. His writing analyses class and colonial politics in Marxist terms and contains nothing resembling a settlement-by-settlement study of provincial budgets.
(d)Jawaharlal Nehru — Jawaharlal Nehru’s books are the best known of the four and the least like this one. An Autobiography (1936) was written largely in prison, Glimpses of World History (1934) began as letters to his daughter, and The Discovery of India (1946) is a sweeping cultural history. All three are works of narrative and reflection written for a general reader; none is a technical study of centre-province financial relations. A candidate who picks Nehru is usually pattern-matching on fame rather than on the subject the title announces.

Concept

The book is about fiscal decentralisation — the division of revenue and spending powers between a central government and its provinces — and the history it tracks is worth knowing on its own account, because the same problem became the Finance Commission after 1950. Until 1870 British Indian finance was completely centralised: provincial governments collected revenue and spent money as agents of the Government of India, with no budget of their own and no incentive to economise, since any saving went to the centre and any excess demand was met by the centre. Lord Mayo’s resolution of 1870 broke that pattern by handing each province a fixed assignment out of central revenues to run specified departments — police, jails, education, medical services, roads — and letting it keep what it saved. Later settlements went further: certain heads of revenue were made wholly provincial, then certain heads were divided between the two governments in fixed proportions, and the arrangements were renegotiated every five years. Ambedkar’s study follows that sequence and asks what drove it, concluding that the motive was imperial economy rather than any move towards self-rule.

The modern-history block of the EO/AO General Ability Test leans heavily on author-and-work and founder-and-organisation pairs, and this is the opening item of that block. The habit it rewards is reading the title for its subject matter instead of hunting for a remembered fact. Three of the four names here belong to men who wrote famous books, so recall alone gives no discrimination; what discriminates is noticing that the words ’provincial decentralization of imperial finance’ describe a specialist exercise in public finance, and then asking which of the four was a professional economist. It also rewards knowing the less-advertised half of well-known lives. Ambedkar’s economics — this study, and his work on Indian currency — is examined far less often than his role in framing the Constitution, and it is exactly where a paper aiming to separate prepared candidates from half-prepared ones will look.

Key facts

The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India grew out of B. R. Ambedkar’s doctoral research in economics at Columbia University and was published in London in 1925.
Its subject is the financial relationship between the Government of India and the provinces, traced from the wholly centralised system that followed the Charter Act of 1833.
Lord Mayo’s resolution of 1870 is the hinge of that story: it gave provinces fixed assignments out of central revenue and, with them, budgets of their own to manage.
Ambedkar’s other well-known work in economics is The Problem of the Rupee : Its Origin and Its Solution, the thesis for which the University of London awarded him a D.Sc. in 1923.
Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901) is the classic statement of the drain of wealth, a different argument about a different transfer of resources.
M. N. Roy founded the emigre Communist Party of India at Tashkent in 1920 and wrote India in Transition (1922).
Jawaharlal Nehru’s three best-known books are An Autobiography (1936), Glimpses of World History (1934) and The Discovery of India (1946).

Read the title for its subject, then ask which of the four was an economist

(b) Dr. B. R. Ambedkar→The book grew out of his doctoral research in economics at Columbia University and was published in London in 1925. Of the four men on the list only he wrote as a trained academic economist holding a doctorate in the subject, and this is a technical monograph in public finance.

What the book argues→It traces the financial relationship between the Government of India and the provinces from the wholly centralised system that followed the Charter Act of 1833, through Lord Mayo’s resolution of 1870 and the settlements after it, and concludes that decentralisation was a device for controlling expenditure rather than a concession to self-government.

(a) Dadabhai Naoroji→The strongest miss, since he did write on imperial finance. But his case is Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), the classic statement of the drain of wealth. Naoroji argued about the transfer of resources from India to Britain; this work analyses the internal division between centre and provinces.

(c) M. N. Roy→A revolutionary and communist theorist, not a public-finance scholar. He founded the emigre Communist Party of India at Tashkent in 1920 and wrote India in Transition (1922); in his last phase he abandoned communism for Radical Humanism.

(d) Jawaharlal Nehru→An Autobiography (1936), Glimpses of World History (1934) and The Discovery of India (1946) — all works of narrative and reflection written for a general reader, and none of them a technical study of centre-province financial relations.

Ambedkar’s other work in economics→The Problem of the Rupee : Its Origin and Its Solution, the thesis for which the University of London awarded him a D.Sc. in 1923.

Study next

Provincial finance under the Raj: Mayo’s resolution of 1870, the quinquennial settlements, and the Meston Award and the divided heads of the 1919 reformsAmbedkar as an economist — The Problem of the Rupee, the evidence he gave to the Hilton Young Commission, and the rupee-exchange debate of the 1920sThe drain of wealth as argued by Dadabhai Naoroji, R. C. Dutt and M. G. Ranade, and the counter-arguments of official economistsHow the centre-province fiscal question descends into the Constitution as Articles 268 to 281 and the Finance CommissionAuthor-and-work pairs of the national movement, which recur across EPFO and UPSC modern-history sections

Common traps

Matching on fame rather than on subject. The most famous author on the list is rarely the author of a technical monograph.
Assuming a name belongs to one field only. Ambedkar was a doctoral economist before he was a constitutional lawyer, and this book is the economist’s work.
Confusing the drain-of-wealth literature, which is about transfers from India to Britain, with provincial finance, which is about transfers inside India.
Reading only the short part of a long title. Everything needed to place this book sits in its subtitle.

EPFO EO/AO papers ask modern-history recall in the flattest possible form — who wrote it, who founded it, who started it, where it first met — with four plain names as options and no code table to work through. Because the stems are short, the discriminating information is usually in the title or the date printed in the stem, and the reliable technique is to translate the title into a subject and then ask which name fits that subject. Ambedkar, Naoroji, Nehru, Tilak, Gokhale and Roy circulate through these option sets constantly, so the profitable preparation is a compact list of one or two signature works against each name rather than a long reading list.

Related PYQs

EPFO_EOAO_2017_Q32Open & attempt →

Which social reformer’s autobiography, entitled Looking Back, describes his experiences in setting up schools for women in Poona in the 1890s?

(a) Dhondo Keshav Karve
(b) K. T. Telang
(c) Jyotirao Phule
(d) Dr. B. R. Ambedkar

Answer(a) Dhondo Keshav Karve

The other author-and-work item in this block, on the autobiography Looking Back — same technique, a title read for its subject and matched to the one name it can belong to.

EPFO_EOAO_2017_Q28Open & attempt →

Which one of the following publications was started by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in 1928?

(a) Pakhtun
(b) Khudai Khidmatgar
(c) Young India
(d) India Awakens

Answer(a) Pakhtun

Asks which publication Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan started in 1928; the same recall of a name against a printed title.

Practice

practice — not a real PYQ
The Problem of the Rupee : Its Origin and Its Solution, the thesis for which the University of London awarded a D.Sc. in 1923, was written by whom?
- (a)Dadabhai Naoroji
- (b)Dr. B. R. Ambedkar
- (c)R. C. Dutt
- (d)M. G. Ranade
Answer(b) Dr. B. R. Ambedkar
practice — not a real PYQ
Which Viceroy’s resolution of 1870 first gave the provinces of British India fixed assignments out of central revenue and budgets of their own to administer?
- (a)Lord Canning
- (b)Lord Lytton
- (c)Lord Mayo
- (d)Lord Ripon
Answer(c) Lord Mayo

Why