Public when asked, Private when questioned

PM CARES was born as a national response to a national emergency. Six years later, its extraordinary institutional character raises a simpler question: who is it ultimately accountable to?

In March 2020, as Covid-19 brought India to a standstill, the Prime Minister appeared before the nation and appealed to citizens to contribute generously to a new fund — PM CARES, created to respond to emergencies and provide relief.

The appeal carried the authority of the office.

Citizens responded. Companies contributed. Corporate social responsibility funds could be channelled into it. Government employees contributed from their salaries. The Prime Minister became its ex-officio Chairperson; the Defence, Home and Finance Ministers became ex-officio trustees. The PMO provided administrative and secretarial support.

The Fund's official address was the Prime Minister's Office.

Yet, when citizens sought information about the Fund under the Right to Information Act, a very different identity emerged: PM CARES was not a public authority under the RTI Act.

That contradiction deserves examination — not because it proves wrongdoing, but because it raises a fundamental democratic question.

How can an institution be so public when asking for public trust, yet so private when asked to account for it?

Public in Appearance, Private in Law

The government's position has been that PM CARES is a public charitable trust, not created by Parliament or the Constitution, and is neither owned nor controlled by the government. It is funded by donations rather than budgetary allocations. The Supreme Court has also described it as a public charitable trust rather than a government fund.

There is a legal argument behind that position.

But legal classification does not necessarily end the democratic question.

The Fund carries the Prime Minister's name. The Prime Minister chairs it. Three serving Cabinet Ministers are ex-officio trustees. The PMO provides administrative support. Donations qualify for tax benefits; companies can count contributions towards CSR obligations; and the Fund has been permitted to receive foreign contributions under the FCRA framework.

None of these facts, individually, establishes impropriety.

Together, however, they create an institution unlike an ordinary private charity.

If its public character is sufficient to inspire citizens and corporations to contribute, why should that public character diminish when citizens seek greater transparency?

And Why Does the State Defend a Private Trust?

There is another intriguing paradox.

When questions concerning PM CARES reached the courts, the Union government's senior law officer, the Solicitor General, appeared for the Centre.

There is nothing improper in government counsel representing the Union in litigation connected with an institution involving senior public officials.

But the institutional question remains difficult to avoid.

If PM CARES is genuinely a private trust, independent of government, why does the State have such a direct interest in defending its private character before the courts?

The government says that the Fund is neither owned nor controlled by it. Yet the Prime Minister chairs it, three Cabinet Ministers sit on its board and the PMO provides administrative support.

So where exactly does the government end and the “private” trust begin?

And perhaps the sharper question is:

When does the government speak for PM CARES, and when does PM CARES speak for itself?

The question has become even more interesting after the Delhi High Court's January 2026 proceedings, in which the court considered whether PM CARES, as a juristic entity, could claim privacy protection under the RTI Act.

A fund that is private enough to resist disclosure, yet public enough to require the State's legal defence, occupies an unusual democratic space.

An Audit Is Not the Same as Transparency

The latest financial disclosures make the question more pertinent.

PM CARES's audited statement for 2024–25, now available on its website, shows total receipts of ₹8,452.95 crore and a closing balance of about ₹8,452 crore. Nearly 93 per cent of the available corpus was held in fixed deposits.

The Fund recorded expenditure of only about ₹87.8 lakh during the year, according to reports based on the audited statement.

That does not automatically mean the money should have been spent.

An emergency fund needs reserves. Money can legitimately be invested until required. Nor should PM CARES be confused with the statutory disaster-response mechanisms of the government, such as the SDRF and NDRF.

But PM CARES was not presented to citizens merely as an investment vehicle. Its stated objectives include responding to emergencies, calamities and distress.

India has since witnessed devastating floods, landslides and other disasters, including in Kerala, Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh.

The legitimate question, therefore, is not:

Why wasn't every disaster funded by PM CARES?

It is:

What are the criteria by which PM CARES decides when an emergency warrants drawing upon its substantial corpus — and why are those criteria not more fully explained to the public?

Why was assistance considered necessary in one crisis and not another?

Who decides?

What thresholds are applied?

How much money is available?

How much has been committed?

How much remains invested?

And what precisely triggers deployment?

Those are not hostile questions.

They are the questions an emergency fund naturally invites citizens to ask.

A Fund Waiting for an Emergency?

There is nothing inherently questionable about keeping an emergency corpus in fixed deposits. Even the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund has historically invested its corpus while retaining resources for relief.

The issue is therefore not the fixed deposit itself.

It is the absence of sufficient public visibility about the principle governing deployment.

If citizens are asked to contribute to an emergency fund, they should reasonably be able to understand how that fund decides when an emergency has become sufficiently serious to warrant assistance.

That is especially relevant when the latest audited figures show a corpus of more than ₹8,400 crore, while nearly the entire balance remains intact.

As James Madison famously warned:

“A popular Government without popular information… is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.”

The point is not that every citizen should become an auditor.

It is that citizens should not have to become investigators to understand a fund created in response to an appeal made in their name.

The Numbers Deserve Questions Too

The latest disclosures also underline another principle: an audit should not close public discussion. It should make meaningful scrutiny possible.

Government figures concerning beneficiaries under the PM CARES for Children scholarship scheme, for instance, have not always been identical across different official statements. A December 2025 PIB release listed 3,847 beneficiaries for 2022–23, 3,676 for 2023–24 and 3,383 for 2024–25.

These differences may have entirely innocent administrative explanations — revisions, timing or changes in the beneficiary database.

But that is precisely the point.

The public should not have to guess.

A transparent institution explains the difference.

The same principle applies to its accounts.

An audit is valuable. But transparency requires more than an auditor's certification. It requires information that allows citizens to understand the figures, the decisions behind them and the reasons for significant variations.

The CAG Question

The Fund is audited by an independent chartered accountant appointed by its trustees. Its own FAQ states that there is no statutory period prescribed for the audit under the Income Tax Act.

That arrangement may be legally permissible.

But should legality be the ceiling of transparency?

Why not allow the Comptroller and Auditor General — or another unquestionably independent public audit mechanism — to examine a fund so closely associated with the highest offices of government?

The argument should not be that the CAG must automatically have jurisdiction.

It should be:

Why was the strongest possible public-audit mechanism not chosen voluntarily?

That might have removed much of the continuing suspicion surrounding the Fund.

The Larger Question

PM CARES should not be casually equated with controversies such as Pegasus, Rafale or questions concerning the Prime Minister's educational qualifications. Their legal and factual circumstances are different.

Yet they raise a broader democratic concern.

Again and again, citizens can encounter a boundary around information: national security in one case, privacy in another, institutional jurisdiction somewhere else.

Some of these protections are necessary. A democracy cannot function without legitimate confidentiality.

But confidentiality should be the exception, not the instinct.

George Orwell put the principle starkly:

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

In a healthy democracy, however, telling the truth should not have to be revolutionary.

The Question Behind PM CARES

Perhaps, then, the real PM CARES controversy is not whether the Fund is technically a private trust.

Nor is it whether every rupee sitting in a fixed deposit should immediately be spent.

Nor even whether every decision made by its trustees is wrong.

The deeper question is about institutional accountability.

A fund can be legally private and still possess an unmistakably public character.

It can be financially sound and still be insufficiently transparent.

It can be properly audited and still leave citizens with legitimate questions.

And a government can have every legal right to defend an institution in court while still being asked why that institution is so closely intertwined with the machinery of the State.

If PM CARES is private, why does the State defend its privacy?

If it is public in character, why should citizens struggle to examine it?

And if it exists for emergencies, why should citizens have to struggle to understand when an emergency qualifies for its assistance?

Transparency is not merely the publication of selected figures on a website.

It is the willingness to answer uncomfortable questions.

Because in a democracy, the citizen's question is not an inconvenience to the State. It is one of the ways by which the State remains accountable to the citizen.

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(Author: kgsharma1@gmail.com; The writer is a retired officer of the Indian Information Service and a freelance writer. Also worked as an international media consultant with UNICEF Nigeria and contributes regularly to various publications.)