On March 28th, 2020, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the creation of a separate fund to deal with the COVID-19 situation in the country- the PM-CARES fund or the Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund. It is unclear why a separate fund was required when the country already has the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF) in place to deal with such circumstances. The predicament with this new fund is this- it entirely lacks transparency.

Despite widespread demands to bring the PM-CARES fund under the Right to Information (RTI) Act and allow the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India to audit the fund, the Modi Government is adamant on not allowing it. Activists and civil society groups question why the government is shying away from bringing transparency into the usage of this fund. There seems to be no reason to deny this- the fund was set-up by a central government order, is governed by a trust headed by the Prime Minister, is eligible for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds from corporations, eligible for 100% tax rebates, exempted from Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) norms and has collected tremendous amounts of donations from government bodies and PSUs. The entire government machinery was put to use to mobilise donations for this opaque fund. Modi had personally, on March 30th, told 130 Indian heads of missions abroad to give this fund wide publicity in order to receive foreign donations. In any functional democracy, these would serve as enough grounds to declare the PM-CARES fund a public authority under the RTI Act.

The PM-CARES was created for the following reasons-

‘1. To undertake and support relief or 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 up-gradation of healthcare or pharmaceutical facilities, other necessary infrastructure, funding relevant research or any other type of support.

2. To render financial assistance, provide grants of payments of money or take such other steps as may be deemed necessary by the Board of Trustees to the affected population.

3. To undertake any other activity, which is not inconsistent with the above objects.’

Following the announcement of this fund on March 28, donations poured in from all quarters- including public and private entities. Within four days, it had collected 3076 crores. As per an IndiaSpend report of May 20, the fund had received approximately Rs 9677 crores (1.27 Billion Dollars) in donations according to publicly available data on that date. An additional Rs 2098 crore was also pledged by that date. This excludes many donations which have not been publicised by the government or private players. It is not unreasonable to assume that the corpus in the fund would only have increased in the following months. The outgoing fund or the expenditure, however, has not been at the same rate. Six months in, merely Rs 3100 crores from the fund were allocated for the care of migrant labourers (Rs 1000 crore), 50,000 made-in India ventilators (Rs 2000 crore) and vaccine development (100 crores). Even this has not been controversy-free. According to a recent RTI-based report in the Huffington Post, Rs 373 crores were provided to a Chennai-based medical technology company called Trivitron Healthcare from the PM CARES fund, to build 10,000 ventilators, even though this company has never made ventilators before.

PM-CARES funds accumulate but Modi govt on a borrowing spree

On April 22, the Modi government had announced a Rs 15,000 crore special package called- ”India COVID-19 Emergency Response and Health System Preparedness Package’. The main objective of this package was to ‘include mounting emergency response to slow and limit COVID-19 in India through the development of diagnostics and COV1D-dedicated treatment facilities, centralized procurement of essential medical equipment and drugs required for treatment of infected patients, strengthen and build resilient National and State health systems to support prevention and preparedness for future disease outbreaks, setting up of laboratories and bolster surveillance activities, biosecurity preparedness, pandemic research and proactively engage communities and conduct risk communication activities’, very similar to the vaguely worded objectives of the PM-CARES fund.

What the Government has concealed is the fact that this Rs 15,000 crore was taken as a loan from three international banks on a long term basis. Replying to an RTI filed by this author on behalf of The Logical Indian, S. Nayak, Deputy Secretary in the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare has furnished the details of the loan taken from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

RTI response by Ministry of Health & Family Welfare

Rs 15000 C…