PM CARES: Donations drop, interests accrue, utilisation abysmal

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The Newly Installed Oxygen Generation Plant, most of the equipments are funded by PM Cares fund at Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality Hospital, Tahirpur in New Delhi on Saturday, August 28, 2021. | Photo Credit: MOORTHY RV

The audited financial statements of Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations (PM-CARES) Fund, released together on Tuesday for the financial years of 2023-24 and 2024-25 after a delay of two years, showed that while donations have dropped the utilisation of available funds was abysmally low.

The corpus grew by 25.8% between 2022-23 and 2024-25 from ₹ 6,722 crore to ₹ 8,453 crore. However, in the same period, the utilisation dropped from ₹437.9 crore to just ₹87.5 lakh, which was just 0.01% or 10,000 times smaller than the available corpus.

The money flowing into the funds through donations and interests from corpus far exceeded the money disbursed since 2022-23.

Moreover, “refund” from “implementing agencies” was far higher than the money utilised. Neither the details of these implementing agencies nor the purpose for which the refunded money was originally allotted has been made available. The utilisation during 2023-24 and 2024-25 was almost entirely under the PM CARES for Children Scheme.

The donations received have dropped sharply and the growth in the corpus was mainly due to earnings through interests. In 2024-25, the income received through interest payments (₹ 475 crore) was almost the same as the donations (₹480 crore).

The sharp increase in interest income could be attributed to the Union government moving the corpus from savings account to fixed deposits in 2023-24.

Ever since its creation as a public charitable trust in March 2020 during the pandemic, PM-CARES has come under criticism from the opposition parties and many in civil society for lack of transparency, refusal to share information under the Right to Information Act and inordinate delays in releasing even the limited information through financial statements. Interestingly, the prolonged delay (Chart 6) in the release of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 statements coincided with the Union government changing auditors from one private firm to another.

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