Page:The Imperial Gazetteer of India - Volume 10 (2nd edition).pdf/410



398 NORTH-IVESTERN PROVINCES AND OUDH. subordinate to hiin; while in Oudh and Jhansi, three Districts form a Commissionership. In Oudh and Jhansi also, the Commissioners combine criminal jurisdiction with their revenue and executive duties, and are the Sessions Judges of their Districts, a function held by separate judicial officers in the North-Western Provinces proper. Each District is administered by a District officer, styled Magistrate and Collector in the North-Western Provinces proper, and DeputyCommissioner in Oudh and Jhansi. The District officer is the direct representative of the Executive Government in all departments, and is ordinarily a member of the Covenanted Civil Service. Primarily he is responsible for the peace of the District and the collection of its revenue, but there is no branch of the administration with which he is not concerned. He is head of the police; is responsible for the work of the District treasury; superintends the excise and the collection of the revenue from stamps ; is still in many cases (and was always till lately) president of all the municipalities in his District, and of the District committee for the expenditure of local rates. He is required to interest himself in all matters in which Government has any concern, and to look after sanitation, road, and arboriculture. He also hears criminal and revenue appeals from the subordinate courts; he has always the power, and in some parts of the Province is expected, to take a share in the criminal work of the District; and in Oudh and Jhansi his jurisdiction extends to the sentencing of criminals to seven years' imprisonment. To aid him in performing these and other duties, he has a staff of assistants, of whom one at least is usually a covenanted officer. One of these assistants, generally an uncovenanted Deputy Collector, takes the work of the treasury, and the ordinary work of the District is parcelled out amongst the others. The police are under a special officer, the District Superintendent, who is the Magistrate's assistant in the Police Department, and who works immediately under that officer. At each tahsili or Sub-divisional head-quarters is a tahsildir, invested usually with both magisterial and revenue powers, who has a large staff of subordinates, and is to the tahsil very much what the District officer is to the District. His duties are equally multifarious. Revenue and Expenditure.—The following figures are reproduced from statements supplied for the purpose. They do not exactly tally with the gross returns as made up from the Provincial Treasury accounts. The total revenue of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh in 1883-84 -- imperial, Provincial, and local -- amounted to £9,018,900, and the total expenditure to £4,262,500. The difference between these two sums is almost wholly represented by the land revenue, which is credited to imperial funds. The land revenue in 1883–84 was £5,680, 700, the cost of collecting it being £800,700.