Is the PM CARES Fund India's ‘Electoral Bonds 2.0?’ No RTI, No CAG, No Accountability

The PM CARES Fund collected thousands of crores from public sector undertakings (PSUs), Indian and foreign companies, salaries of public servants and from ordinary people. When people asked where the funds were coming from and where they were spent, the government flatly refused.

Senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan joins Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri on this edition of Jaanne Bhi Do Yaaro to discuss India's most unaccountable fund and whether this is ‘Electoral Bonds 2.0’.

In March 2020, the PM CARES Fund was set up as India faced the COVID-19 crisis. The prime minister, home minister, defence minister and finance minister were made ex-officio trustees. The fund uses the national emblem and runs on a gov.in domain. It was made eligible to receive corporate social responsibility (CSR) funding as it was set up by the Union government.

In less than one week it amassed over Rs 3,000 crore and in one year collected more than Rs 10,000 crore. PSUs transferred thousands of crores into it from their CSR funds. Employees across government departments were asked to donate from their salaries. The PM advised Indian missions abroad to publicise the fund and mobilise donations from abroad.

All the donations were made tax-exempt and the fund was also exempted from all provisions of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) – allowing it to receive funds from foreign sources without even a registration under FCRA.

But when citizens filed RTI applications to find out how this money was being used – they were told PM CARES is not a public authority and hence is not answerable under the RTI Act. In fact the government retrospectively amended the Companies Act schedule and added PM CARES as a separate entity eligible to receive CSR funding.

The PMO has told the Lok Sabha secretariat that questions and other parliamentary interventions about the PM CARES Fund are not admissible in the House. The fund is not audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General and has not published its audited accounts in the last three years. The fund collected more than Rs 13,000 crore in the first three years.

In this video we break down the following: what exactly is PM CARES? Who controls it? Where has the money gone? What was the controversy over the ventilators supplied from the PM CARES Fund? And why has the government built a wall of secrecy around a fund that has every appearance of being public money? Has the PM CARES Fund become ‘Electoral Bonds 2.0’, allowing anonymity to donors to hide quid pro quo arrangements and regulatory inaction?

We discuss the legal structure of PM CARES, the court battles around it, its similarities with the electoral bonds scheme and what this opacity means for Indian democracy.

Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri are transparency activists associated with Satark Nagrik Sangathan and the National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information.

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