JOIN USThe Supreme Court’s judgement on Tuesday refusing to order the transfer of PM-CARES funds for Covid-19 relief to the National Disaster Response Fund is unfortunate, and will not put an end to the controversy over this newly constituted fund. The court said that PM-CARES is a public charitable trust which consists entirely of voluntary contributions from individuals and organisations and does not get any budgetary support and to which no government money is credited. It also said the Covid-19 pandemic had highlighted the need for immediate enhancement of medical infrastructure and so the creation of a fund with necessary resources to meet the emergent situation was unexceptionable. It rejected the demand for the auditing of the trust funds by the CAG. But the court’s judgement does not answer all the questions raised about the fund.
The issue is not whether the government has the right to set up a fund for the purpose mentioned, but the need for it when the National Disaster Relief Fund, which has the same purpose, already existed. The government has not explained this to the court or the public. It is a public trust to which public and private institutions can make voluntary contributions, with the Prime Minister as its ex-officio chairman and three cabinet ministers as trustees. The government has claimed that it is not a public authority under the Right to Information (RTI) Act and is not answerable to enquiries under the Act. But when it was set up, it was a government-created entity, and it was later that it was made into a trust. A large part of the contributions made to the fund is from public sector organisations. These are public funds and so the people have the right to know how they are utilised.
From the beginning, there has been a complete lack of transparency about the fund and its working. The government has incentivised contributions to the fund by declaring that they would qualify for corporate social responsibility expenditure. But it has not disclosed the list of donors who have made the contributions. It is not known how much money has been collected. The details of how the funds have been spent are also not known. Since public funds are involved and there is public interest in the working of the fund, the demand for its auditing by the CAG is right and legitimate. The government says “transparency is writ large on the fund’’ but it is not seen by others, and it stonewalls all queries about it. Unfortunately, it makes it seem as if those who make the demand for transparency are trying to obstruct the fight against coronavirus.