Which Viceroy decentralized the colonial economic structure in India ?

Question

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Correct — B, Mayo. The single word that decides this question is 'economic'. Until 1870 the Government of India ran one undivided purse: every rupee of revenue in every province flowed to the centre, and every rupee of provincial spending came back as a centrally sanctioned allotment, item by item. A province that economised gained nothing, and a province that overspent simply asked for more. Lord Mayo, Viceroy from January 1869 until his assassination at Port Blair in February 1872, broke that arrangement with his Resolution of 1870. It handed the provincial governments a fixed lump-sum grant together with a defined list of expenditure heads — police, jails, education, medical services, roads, printing and the like — and told them to run those services inside that sum, keeping what they saved. That is the bifurcation of central and provincial finance, and it is the measure Indian administrative history labels 'financial decentralisation'. Wikipedia's account of the evolution of local institutions in India puts the starting point at exactly this measure: 'From 1870, when Lord Mayo's Resolution on decentralization aimed to improve administrative efficiency, meet public demands, and bolster colonial finances, there was significant impetus for the development of local institutions.' Mayo's own biographical record says the same thing from the other side — he 'reorganised the country's finances' and 'to solve local problems he established local boards'. The 69th CCE asked the same fact in statement form and keyed the two limbs this card rests on: that the Resolution was the first step bifurcating central and provincial finances, and that provincial governments were empowered to administer certain services. So the Viceroy who decentralised the *economic* structure is Mayo.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The strongest wrong answer, and the reason this question is worth slowing down for. Ripon's Resolution of 18 May 1882 is the famous decentralisation measure — it is why he is called the Father of Local Self-Government in India — but it decentralised *government*, not *finance*. It provided for local bodies with a large majority of elected non-official members under a non-official chairman, and Ripon defended it on the twin grounds of administrative efficiency and political education. That is administrative and political devolution, twelve years after Mayo had already split the purse.  (c) The opposite of the stem. Curzon's viceroyalty (1899–1905) is the textbook centralising one: the Calcutta Corporation Act 1899 cut the elected Indian majority in the city's municipality, the Indian Universities Act 1904 brought the universities under tighter official control, and the Police Commission of 1902–03 and the Partition of Bengal of 1905 both worked to concentrate authority rather than disperse it. No standard account credits him with devolving anything.  (d) This option is correct only if you can name at least two viceroys in the list who each decentralised the *economic* structure — and you cannot. Ripon extended Mayo's provincial settlements and is a decentraliser in the wider sense, but his own resolution is about elected local bodies, and Curzon pulls the other way entirely. One measure, one man, one year: the Resolution of 1870.

Concept: Financial decentralisation in British India was a fifty-year experiment carried out in four steps, and each step is a named viceroy. Before 1870 the system was 'wholly centralised': provincial revenues were credited to the imperial exchequer and provincial expenditure was sanctioned from Calcutta head by head. Mayo's Resolution of 1870 made the first break, assigning provinces a fixed grant for a defined bundle of services. Lord Lytton widened it in 1877 by giving provinces a share of certain growing revenue heads instead of a frozen lump sum, so that provincial income could rise with the province. Ripon's settlements of 1882 divided revenue heads into imperial, provincial and 'divided', and put the arrangement on a five-yearly quasi-permanent footing. The line runs from there to the Meston Settlement of 1920 and the separation of central and provincial heads under the Government of India Act, 1919. The purpose throughout was fiscal, not democratic: the Government of India was short of money after the Mutiny and the famines, and making provinces bear their own service budgets was a way of forcing economy.

State PCS 2025 Q51 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q51 — History PYQ with Answer