तारांकित प्रश्न ★ 6

F. No. SI/Q6/WHO-CARESसेवा में: The Prime Minister's Office & the Trustees of PM CARES

The Fund That Cares Deeply About Its Own Privacy

A fund named after the Prime Minister, chaired by the Prime Minister, stamped with the national emblem and hosted on gov.in told a court it is not a Government of India fund. It raised ₹3,076 crore in its first five days. Its last published accounts are from FY 2022-23, uploaded 21 months late.

प्रश्न, भारत सरकार के लिए

One of two sentences is true, and the government has filed both. If PM CARES is the government's, then the CAG can audit it, the RTI Act covers it, and Parliament may ask about it, beginning with the FY24 and FY25 accounts, now three years overdue. If it is a private trust, kindly explain what a private trust is doing with the national emblem, a gov.in address, the Prime Minister as ex officio chairman and serving PMO officers signing its accounts. Pick a sentence. The donations were collected under the first. The refusals are being issued under the second.

Not a Public Authority · Books 3 Years Overdue

अभिलेख, प्रदर्श-वार

PM CARES was constituted on 27 March 2020 as a public charitable trust. The Prime Minister chairs it ex officio. The Ministers of Defence, Home and Finance are its ex officio trustees. It operates out of the Prime Minister's Office, wears the national emblem, lives at pmcares.gov.in, and collected ₹3,076.62 crore in its first five days on an opening corpus of ₹2.25 lakh. In court, this apparatus describes itself as follows: not a public authority under the RTI Act, not “State” under Article 12, and, per a PMO Under Secretary's sworn affidavit, “not a Government of India fund”. The government's position, filed in writing, is that the thing wearing the government's emblem, the government's domain and the Prime Minister's name is a private stranger.
The paper trail of that position: a law student asked for the trust deed in April 2020 and was told the RTI Act does not apply. The Supreme Court declined to order a CAG audit in August 2020, on the reasoning that public charitable trusts are not the CAG's business. Two writ petitions filed by Samyak Gangwal in 2020 and 2021, asking the Delhi High Court to call the fund what it plainly is, remain undecided six years later. And in January 2026 a division bench hearing the tax-exemption RTI appeal observed, orally, that even a government-controlled fund “would not lose the right to privacy”. Somewhere between 2020 and 2026, the file migrated from your right to know to its right to be left alone.
The auditor is SARC & Associates, a private Delhi firm appointed without tender. The firm says it was appointed on 23 April 2020; the public learnt of it on 11 June. Its head, Sunil Kumar Gupta, also audits the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund, whose auditors of a decade were replaced after 2019, so one gentleman now audits both of the Prime Minister's funds. He has been statutory auditor to ONGC, Indian Overseas Bank and SBI General Insurance, and has promoted Make in India and Mudra on Doordarshan and Zee Business. The independence of the audit may be assessed from the photographs of the auditor alongside the Prime Minister and assorted union ministers. It is a thorough collection.
The rules were redrafted mid-collection. On 26 May 2020, Schedule VII of the Companies Act was amended, retrospectively to 28 March, so that corporate donations to PM CARES count as CSR. The ministry's circular of 10 April had already clarified that donations to Chief Ministers' relief funds do not. Thirty-eight public sector undertakings then moved ₹2,105 crore of CSR money into the fund; ONGC gave ₹300 crore, and Power Finance Corporation's ₹200 crore exceeded its entire estimated CSR budget for the year. Thirteen lakh railway employees gave a day's salary, ₹151 crore, announced on their behalf by their minister. The armed forces' salaries yielded ₹203.67 crore, officially voluntary. At six DAV colleges in Punjab, teachers unpaid for four months discovered ₹5 crore had gone from their salaries to the fund on the management's call. The generosity was overwhelming, in the sense that a number of the donors were not consulted about it.
Foreign money was welcome too. PM CARES was exempted from the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act in its entirety and opened its own foreign-donation account. Under that same Act, the Home Ministry has cancelled the registrations of thousands of NGOs, including charities that were feeding people through the same pandemic. The law that strangles every other charity in India was waived, whole, for the one charity nobody is permitted to examine.
What the money bought: roughly ₹2,146 crore went to 50,000 “Made in India” ventilators. SMHS Hospital in Srinagar received 165 it had not asked for; an RTI reply of September 2020 records that all 165 were found defective in testing or use, heating up, failing to deliver oxygen, or stopping without notice. In May 2021 the Bombay High Court's Aurangabad bench recorded 113 of 150 units defective in Maharashtra's government hospitals and called the failures “life threatening”. These are machines with one job, and the job is breathing. The fund's own FY23 statement records ₹202.89 crore refunded by the ventilator procurement, part of roughly ₹225 crore that flowed back across suppliers. The accounts do not record what the wards did while the refunds were processed.
(Stapled, in fairness: the fund has done real things. 6.6 crore vaccine doses. 162 oxygen plants. PM CARES for Children paid ₹346 crore in FY23 for 4,543 children orphaned by COVID, a ₹10 lakh corpus, health cover and a scholarship each, and that was nearly 80% of everything the fund spent that year. Good works, genuinely. Which is rather the point: good works survive audits. The orphans' scheme would pass any inspection this country could throw at it. What is the rest of the ledger's difficulty?)
The books have now gone dark. Contributions collapsed to ₹912 crore in FY23, the lowest ever, spending fell to ₹439.38 crore, and ₹6,283.68 crore sat in savings accounts. That FY23 statement was signed by the auditor on 29 March 2024, a year after the books closed, uploaded around December 2024, 21 months late, and it references eleven pages of auditor's notes that have never been published. For FY24 and FY25 there is nothing at all; the last audited year on the official website is still 2022-23. Meanwhile, per The Wire, the PMO has informed Parliament that questions about PM CARES are not admissible in the House. A fund that raised its first ₹3,076 crore in five days has not published an account in three years.

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