Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/208

200 In order to introduce the railway and the telegraph in India, Lord Dalhousie had to reconstitute the whole Department of Public Works. Indeed, before his time such a Department^ in the modern sense of the term, did not exist. A Military Board had mismanaged a parsimonious expenditure averaging, during seventeen years, only £169,901 per annum, on all works of public utility apart from Military and Civil Buildings. Even of this sum a large proportion had gone for repairs, and one estimate returns 'the average Public Works expenditure (after deductions) of the pre-Dalhousie period at £90,000 or a half per cent, of the public revenue '. Even down to 1850, the most competent authorities state that the average yearly charge for the whole of India, for all Public Works, excepting of course Military and Civil Buildings, 'hardly exceeded £250,000 .' According to the Parliamentary return the entire charge of Public Works of every sort in 1847, the year preceding Lord Dalhousie's arrival, only amounted to £260,000.

Lord Dalhousie during his eight years of office abolished the old incompetent Military Board, created a great Department of Public Works, and increased the Public Works expenditure to 2½