When COVID-19 unleashed chaos across India, the government of India announced a fund with a name that was meant to elicit trust in the citizens: PM CARES. The Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund. Collecting over Rs 3,000 crore in its first month alone, the fund was supposed to be a beacon of hope in the middle of a crisis. But nearly five years after it was started, there is barely any clarity in the financial reports of the fund released by the government.
Repeatedly, the Government of India led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has refused to allow citizens to access information about the fund under the Right to Information Act. The reason, they claim, is that this is not a government body — but a charitable trust set up and controlled by the Prime Minister, Home Minister, and other “trustees”.
Five years on, as the debate continues on whether the PM, HM and other executives of the government are answerable to the citizens of India under the Right to Information Act, it's important to take a closer look at the data we do have.
What we know
The PM CARES fund, created on March 27, 2020, has made the receipt and payment accounts reports for the four financial years since its inception public.
These reports, however, are bare-bones statements with details of receipts (voluntary contributions, foreign contributions, interest on these amounts etc.), payments (towards oxygen plants and other COVID-19 related expenses), and the remaining balance. What is missing are detailed financial statements that tell us who donated how much to the fund, to whom payments were released, and on what dates; what’s also missing are the auditors’ observations.
Two months after PM CARES was set up, IndiaSpend reported that it had collected at least Rs 9,677.9 crore, based on an analysis of government press releases and media reports on private companies and individuals donating and/or pledging money to the fund. An amount of Rs 4,308.3 crore had been donated by government agencies and staff, and of that, at least Rs 438.8 crore had been deducted as one-day’s salary of government employees. Some of these employees were not happy with such deductions.
The receipts and payments of the PM CARES Fund for the last financial year 2023-2024 are yet to be made public, even as Right to Information requests for information about the fund and its functioning have been denied multiple times. Even the information available for financial years 2019-20 to 2022-23 is a statement of receipts and payments, and complete audit reports are not available.
As per the FY 2022-23 receipts and payments account that was uploaded on the PM CARES Fund official website, it received close to Rs 909 crore as voluntary contributions, and Rs 2.57 crore as foreign contributions.
By March 31, 2023, the fund held Rs 62,83,68,30,782 (or almost Rs 6,284 crore) in savings bank accounts, as per the statement for 2022-23.
We have reached out to the offices of the Prime Minister and the Ministers for Defence, Home Affairs, and Finance for comment on how the Fund plans to utilise, or has utilised, the balance available, the timelines for uploading complete audit reports, and the financial statements for the subsequent years. We will update this story when we receive a response.
Where was the money spent?
Oxygen plants
The PM CARES website contains receipts and payments statements, which provide a summary of monetary transactions under four headers: Opening Balance, Receipts, Payment Disbursal and Closing Balance. A closer look reveals that all of these reports were originally accompanied by the auditors’ notes (pages 1-6 for 2019-20, 1-10 for 2020-21, 1-11 for 2021-22 and 1-11 for 2022-23). These notes, which are supposed to shed light on the bare-bones receipts and payments statements, are however not uploaded on the fund’s website.
We have written to the Prime Minister’s Office seeking information on the rest of the audit reports. We will update this story when we receive a response.
An audit report would include not just the trust’s financial statements with detailed information, but also the auditors’ notes on whether the finances have been reported truthfully and reliably, without errors.
The statements on the PM CARES website show that the main headers of payments made are towards the supply of ventilators to government hospitals, funds for migrant workers, installation of the Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) oxygen plants, procurement of COVID-19 vaccines, establishment of makeshift COVID-19 hospitals etc. Neither the names of hospitals which have received this equipment, nor the quantity supplied to hospitals are included in the balance sheet.
The Ministry of Health & Family Welfare’s (MoHFW) annual report for 2021-22 mentions the procurement of medical equipment through PM CARES: as of December 31, 2021, the report said, Rs 95.99 crore was spent through PM CARES in procuring the PSA plants.
By October 2021, 1,225 PSA plants were installed at hospitals nationwide under PM CARES, taking the total plants installed to 4,135, as IndiaSpend reported on December 2. With demand for oxygen subsiding, many are not working, or not in use due to concerns over quality of output or other reasons. Experts say these plants need to be audited, and hospitals should be mandated to keep them running, so that they remain functional in case demand for medical oxygen rises again in the future.
Children who lost parents to COVID-19
On May 29, 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a number of benefits to children impacted by COVID-19. He said that all children who had lost both parents, or the surviving parent, or legal guardian/adoptive parents due to COVID-19 will be supported under the PM CARES for Children scheme. The scheme promised educational, health, and financial support to affected children.
The statement for 2022-23 mentions disbursement of Rs 346 crore to the PM CARES for Children scheme. We examined the PM CARES for Children web portal, press releases and the Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD)’s responses in Parliament to gather more information on the scheme.
A press release issued on July 29, 2022 by the WCD Ministry stated that 206 children in Rajasthan and 55 in Assam were given Rs 16.84 crore and Rs 4.44 crore respectively under PM CARES.
Seven months later, in February 2023, the ministry told Parliament that a total amount of Rs 341.87 crore had been credited to 4,345 children under the scheme. This Lok Sabha response was also shared with transparency activist Commodore Lokesh Batra under RTI.
The following month, the WCD Ministry repeated this figure in Rajya Sabha, explaining the modalities of the scheme. “A pro-rata amount has been credited in the post office account of each identified child in such a manner that the corpus for each child becomes Rs 10 lakh at the time of attaining 18 years of age,” the ministry said. “Children below the age of 18 years, who are staying with their relatives, are receiving Rs 4,000 per month. The children staying in childcare institutions are provided boarding and lodging facilities on govt. cost.”
As of December 9, 2024, the PM CARES for Children website showed that applications of 4,543 children – 198 more than the number first stated 22 months ago – from 32 states and 558 districts have been approved. The website also has state- and district-level data on the number of beneficiaries, but does not provide the amount released by the PM CARES Fund.
Further, while the website does not provide details of rejections, news reports published on July 16, 2024 show that 51% applications were rejected, the reason for which is unclear. We have reached out to the WCD Ministry for comment on the rejections. We will update this story when we receive a response.
Separately, the Health Ministry, in its 2023-24 annual report, mentions a beneficiary base of 5,000 children eligible for health insurance/assurance under PM CARES, and shows that claims for two children were raised and paid, for Rs 32,790 in total.
No funds for non-COVID disasters
The fund’s objectives include relief and assistance of “any kind relating to a public health emergency or any other kind of emergency, calamity or distress, either man-made or natural, including the creation or upgradation of healthcare or pharmaceutical facilities, other necessary infrastructure, funding relevant research or any other type of support.”
An analysis of the receipts and payments statements shows that the expenses as of March 2023 included only those related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
India witnessed major natural disasters during 2020 and 2021, such as Cyclone Amphan that devastated West Bengal in May 2020 with a death toll of 90, and Cyclone Tauktae in the Arabian Sea that made landfall in Gujarat in May 2021, claiming 144 lives, damaging 1,41,000 houses and affecting 1,91,000 hectare of cropped area in the western coastal states from Kerala to Gujarat. As per the fund’s balance sheets, there was no monetary relief provided to the victims of these and other natural disasters from its corpus.
The PM CARES controversies
PM CARES was set up at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. The stated objective was to deal with “any kind of emergency or distress situation, like posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.” The fund was registered as a Public Charitable Trust under the Registration Act, 1908, even though the Prime Minister was named as ex-officio chairman, and the Ministers of Defence, Home Affairs, and Finance were listed as ex-officio trustees. This, the trust deed says, was “merely for administrative convenience”, claiming that there is no government control in the fund’s functioning. This makes PM CARES very similar to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF), which was established in 1948 to help people affected by the partition, and can today be used for pretty much the same reasons as PM CARES. So if the form and function of the new fund is the same as the old one, why was it necessary to duplicate an existing system?
The FAQs on the Fund’s website says that “there is no statutory period prescribed for audit of the PM CARES under Income Tax Act. However, an audit will be conducted at the end of the Financial Year.” As we said, the website does not include statements for the financial years 2023-24.
Since PM CARES was registered as a Public Charitable Trust, it is audited by a private and independent auditor and not by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) who audits accounts of Union government ministries, departments and their subordinate offices.
The PM CARES fund engaged M/s SARC & Associates, Chartered Accountants as auditors for three years, the FAQs say. It would appear that the fund has extended the engagement, since the auditing firm has also filed the audit report for FY 2022-23.
RTI inquiries have been met with the response that PM CARES is a Public Charitable Trust and not a private entity. Multiple petitions have been filed in the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court demanding transparency on the PM CARES fund.
A petition was filed in August 2020 in the Supreme Court demanding transfer of the PM CARES Fund to the National Disaster Relief Fund (NDRF) because the latter handles all sorts of natural disasters. The SC, in its judgement in August 2020, however refused to grant any relief to the petitioners, and stated that “the funds collected in the PM CARES fund are entirely different funds which are funds of a public charitable trust and there is no occasion for issuing any direction to transfer the said funds to the NDRF”.
Further, a Letter Patent Appeal filed by the appellant Girish Mittal, against the decision of a single bench of the Delhi High Court in a writ petition filed by the Income Tax Department, is still pending. The appeal demanded that the PM CARES FUNDS should come under the purview of the RTI Act. The appellant has argued that “the nature of the PM CARES Fund is such that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for which any information regarding it could not be sought from a public authority under RTI Act, 2005,” adding that “there is an overwhelming public interest in members of the public getting information about the PM CARES Fund.”
The appeal further pointed out that the “fundamental right to privacy is available only to natural persons / individuals, and not to juridical entities like corporations / trusts…so far as ‘public charitable trusts’ are concerned, they clearly do not have any sort of right to privacy as the same has been established for charitable purposes to serve the public only.”
Mittal told TNM: “They have not shared the income-expenditure account for the last two years also. PM CARES fulfills all the conditions to be deemed as public authority. It is managed by officials of the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), it is located in the PMO. It is substantially financed by (sic) ‘public’. The public has every right to know about its functioning. Hence it undoubtedly is a public authority and should be amenable to RTI.”
According to Pranav Sachdeva, the advocate appearing for the appellant, the fact that the Prime Minister and senior Cabinet ministers are trustees of the fund, and that donations were sought by the government itself through official websites and through advertisements using the name and image of the Prime Minister, conveyed the message that this was a government fund for COVID-19 disaster relief. “Hence the fund must be audited by CAG, its accounts be made public, and it should come under RTI.”
TNM spoke to a retired senior official of CAG who said on condition of anonymity, "It (PM CARES Fund) can be audited under Section 20(1) and 20(2) of DPC Act. Under Section 20(2), even the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) could demand that he wants to audit this body/authority. Why isn’t he doing it?"
The DPC Act, 1971 or the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (Duties, Powers and Conditions of Service) Act, 1971 is an Act to determine the conditions of service of the CAG and to prescribe his duties and powers. Section 20(2) of the Act empowers the CAG to propose to the President or Governor of a state that “he may be authorised to undertake the audit of the accounts of any body or authority…which has not been entrusted to him by law”, if he deems it necessary, and the President or Governor “may empower” the CAG to undertake such audit.
TNM has reached out to the office of the CAG for comment. We will update this story when we receive a response.