PM CARES Opacity Deepens as Parliament Questions Barred

Synopsis

The PM CARES Fund was established in March 2020 to mobilise voluntary contributions in the wake of the pandemic and has not released any audited financial statements since FY 2022-23. The transparency has been reduced since the Prime Minister's Office told Lok Sabha Secretariat in February 2026 that the questions regarding the fund are "admissible" under the procedure, which is criticised for limiting the powers of the lawmakers in oversighting the Prime Minister-led body.

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A trust without a record of the trustee records

The PM CARES Fund (the name was changed from "Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund") was established on March 27, 2020, following the outbreak of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, as a public charitable trust for the purpose of giving assistance in emergency and distress situations.

The entire corpus is contributed voluntarily to the fund, no money comes to the fund from the Consolidated Fund of India and the fund is under the control of the Prime Minister's Office, the Ministers of Defence, Home Affairs and Finance are ex-officio trustees of the fund.

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But six years later, its books are still <em>opaque</em> — a word critics use deftly because no financial statements that have been audited have been made public in the wake of its last disclosure for FY 2022–23.

Independent verification reveals that the deficit is even deeper: even the statement finally uploaded for FY 2022-23 did not include the auditors' notes that accompanied all previous years' statements and income and expenditure data from the following financial year, 2023-24, is still unpublished.

Voluntary contributions to the fund dropped to Rs 912 crore in FY 2022-23 from a peak of Rs 7,184 crore in FY 2020-21, and the closing balance was over Rs 6,283 crore, according to the analysis that was sourced from the PTI.

Parliament shut out

Things got worse in February this year. The PMO has written to Lok Sabha secretariat that questions pertaining to PM CARES, PM National Relief Fund and National Defence Fund are not admissible as per Lok Sabha Rules.

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The PMO argued that the rules of procedure and conduct of business, which prohibit questions on matters not directly related to the main issue of the Government of India or questions concerning bodies not primarily responsible to the government, prohibit such questions.

It is up to the Speaker alone to make the decision over admissibility, and the decision shall be made on a question-by-question basis and not on a subject-by-subject basis, such as a certain fund, former Lok Sabha Secretary General P.D.T. Achary said, raising doubts about the Executive's role in a domain constitutionally reserved for the Chair.

As the executive may take a view on whether such funds are Government bodies, that can then be challenged in court, Parliamentary researcher Chakshu Roy of PRS Legislative Research said.

According to the report, Congress MP K.C. Venugopal among those arguing that move could weaken elected representatives' power to hold the government to account.

The trust is in a liminal space, as per the Supreme Court, PM CARES is a public charitable trust and does not need audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the oversight rests on voluntary disclosure.

Why it matters

It is a structural question, for a fund chaired by the Prime Minister, the use of government infrastructure and the national emblem, what remedial steps the citizens and legislators can take when a body is outside the RTI and CAG's eyes and is now also outside the Question Hour? Activists say the solution is the voluntary disclosure of transparency, which this fund has not yet implemented completely.