Raising concerns about the transparency of funds collected under the Prime Minister Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situation Fund (PM-CARES Fund), retired Supreme Court judge Justice Madan B Lokur said that nobody knows how much money is in the fund or how it is being spent.
“We know government employees have donated money. CSR has been diverted towards PM-CARES. But how much money is there under the Fund? We don’t know. How has it been spent? We don’t know. We were told that it would be utilised for tackling COVID, buying ventilators. What actually has happened? We don’t know,” Justice Lokur said, speaking about the fund.
Justice Lokur was giving a lecture on the RTI Act at an event hosted by the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) to mark the completion of 16 years since the Right to Information Act was enacted in India.
To corroborate his remarks, the former Supreme Court judge also brought up the audit reports which are displayed on the PM-CARES website. From the data available in the audit report for the period of March 28, 2020 – March 31, 2020, Justice Lokur extrapolated that the fund could potentially hold “hundreds and thousands of crores”.
Further, he noted that the audit report for the 2020-21 period is yet to be prepared. He added that, “… nobody has any clue about the audit reports.”
Meanwhile, the Delhi high court is hearing a petition to bring the PM-CARES fund under the purview of the RTI Act. The government on its part has filed an affidavit with the court claiming that the fund had been set up as a charitable trust, not under any law made by the parliament or state legislature and thus does not qualify as a “public authority” under the RTI Act.
Interestingly, on the question of transparency, the affidavit cited the very audit reports which Justice Lokur picked out in his lecture.
Justice Lokur further went on to speak about various other ways the RTI Act has been subverted as well. In particular, he brought up the COVID-19 pandemic in the country and how no information has been forthcoming about the number of people who really died due to COVID or due to a lack of oxygen.
He even noted that, when the government was asked by the Supreme Court about migrant workers and their struggles during the onset of the pandemic, it had said that it had no information on how many people had to migrate.
