Many were surprised when, in 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while addressing a political rally, announced that a new special relief fund was being set up. Why create another fund when the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund has existed since 1948? Was it to cover up the government’s failures in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic? (The Wire extensively covered how, during the pandemic, the government wasted precious time lighting lamps in housing colonies and reciting mantras.) Or was a private fund being set up because the prime minister wanted yet another platform to build his personal brand?

Whatever the motive, PM CARES, registered as a private trust on March 27, 2020, was embroiled in controversies from the very beginning. A shroud of mystery and secrecy has always surrounded it. With the media playing it safe for fear of retaliation, revelations about the fund’s workings emerged only in bits and pieces.

That is why the details about PM CARES published in a study by the Washington-based International Centre for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) are all the more interesting. ICNL explained how relief funds were collected and utilised during the pandemic in six Asian countries – including a six-page chapter dedicated to India’s PM CARES. As the trust deed says, the Prime Minister of India is the chairman of the board of the PM CARES Trust and holds the authority to nominate three other trustees. The mandatory trustee members include office-holders such as the Minister of Defence and the Minister of Finance.

So far, it says, the prime minister has nominated two former members of government and the chairman of the Tata Group to the PM CARES Trust. The trust deed (available on the fund’s website) makes it clear that the trustees are ‘ex officio members’ of the trust since they hold positions in government departments.

This gives the impression that PM CARES is an integral part of the government, but its reluctance to share details with the public – though some information in the form of official audits is now provided – has made its role and status ambivalent. PM CARES also gives the impression that it is an official fund by liberally using national symbols: Satyameva Jayate, the tricolour and the Lion Capital. Moreover, the surfeit of........

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