{"id":2443,"date":"2026-09-26T17:12:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T11:42:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/?p=2443"},"modified":"2026-09-26T17:12:05","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T11:42:05","slug":"pm-cares-fund-discrepencies-and-the-way-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/others\/pm-cares-fund-discrepencies-and-the-way-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"PM Cares Fund: Discrepencies and the way forward"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In third-century BCE China, a logician named Gongsun Long stood at a border checkpoint. According to law, no horses could pass. Gongsun Long was leading a white horse. He argued, with total seriousness, that his horse should be let through because \u201cwhite horse\u201d is not the same category as \u201chorse.\u201d A horse names a shape. White names a colour. Combine them, and you get a third, distinct thing, neither just a shape nor colour alone. Thus, b\u00e1i m\u01ce f\u0113i m\u01ce<\/em> ie. a white horse is not a horse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The guards, however, did not let him pass. But the argument survived him by twenty-three centuries, because it brings to the face something true and dangerous: that language can manufacture a gap between what a thing is<\/em> and what a thing is called,<\/em> and that gap, once open, can be driven through by anyone clever enough to find it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

India built a fund through that very gap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PM CARES is, in substance, a fund run by the Prime Minister, chaired by the Prime Minister, staffed by three sitting cabinet ministers, launched from the Prime Minister\u2019s Office, promoted using the Prime Minister’s image and by the Union Government’s own written admission in response to an RTI query: \u201cowned by, controlled by and established by the Government of India.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet it is legally not<\/em> a public authority under the Right to Information Act. Not because it doesn’t qualify the requirements, but because someone, in 2020, wrote \u201ctrust\u201d instead of \u201cfund,\u201d registered it as a private charitable entity, and thereby performed the exact manoeuvre Long tried at the checkpoint. Basically, public money but private grammar. The public character, surprisingly, doesn’t disappear; it is with ease no more legally visible<\/em>, the way a white horse doesn’t stop being a horse just because a philosopher \u201cconfidently\u201d insisted otherwise. The whole mechanism is the insistence itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After one strips away six years of court filings, this is what remains: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. What funds it: the public, in Rs.10, Rs.500, and one-day salary instalments. 2. What governs it: the Prime Minister and three cabinet ministers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. What it calls itself: a private charitable trust. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. What the government has called it in writing: a body owned, controlled and established by the Government of India. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Who audits it: A private chartered accountancy firm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. Who gets to know how it spends: the public that funded it; legally, no one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last line is the operative legal position that was defended in court this year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The part most of us overlook is that the fight over PM CARES\u2019s transparency has not been settled by legislation or by a single abiding verdict. It just happens to be fought, adjournment by adjournment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story\u2019s sequence goes like: Girish Mittal raised a request, and a public commission (CIC) ordered disclosure. A single judge (Delhi High Court, January 2024) reversed it on tax secrecy grounds. A division bench then signalled it may go further still, extending individual privacy doctrine to a government-chaired trust. Each step moves the baton further from the public closer to the institution, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n

each step is defensible singularly, which is precisely how gaps like Gongsun Long\u2019s get built. Not one grand lie but a bunch of small arguments that add up to a preposterous result. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is worth noting that a separate Bombay Court ruling holds the opposite in principle. It says that a charitable trust owned, controlled, or substantially financed by the government does<\/em> qualify as a public authority, and that these three conditions need not all be met simultaneously. In the end, two high courts read similar facts through different frames and arrived at opposite philosophies of what \u201cpublic\u201d means. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an old joke, usually told about Mulla Nasruddin, that has pestered logicians for decades. A man is on his knees under a streetlamp at night, patting the ground. A passerby asks what he\u2019s looking for. \u201cMy key,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhere did you drop it?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOver there, in the dark.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThen why are you searching here?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause this is where the light is.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every institutional check applied to PM CARES so far is narrow, technical and tidy. Nobody has yet been permitted to search in the dark patch where the real question lies. It is not \u201cdid the trust follow its own rules,\u201d but \u201c should public money, raised in the PM\u2019s name and disbursed by the Prime Minister’s office, ever have been even allowed to write its own rules in the first place.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, newly released audit figures show PM CARES collected Rs.1,162.92 crore across 2023-24 and 2024-25 combined and spent just Rs.16.47 crore. In 2024-25 alone, it took in Rs.479.97 crore and disbursed Rs.87.85 lakh, most of it for children orphaned by Covid in a scheme meant to carry them into adulthood, now apparently burning down. Of the fund\u2019s Rs.8,452 crore balance, Rs.7,846 crore (93%) sits in fixed deposits. Transparency campaigner Anjali Bhardwaj states that roughly 0.01% of the available corpus was actually used that year. On the other side, Rs.324 crore was refunded by the very agencies implementing the fund\u2019s schemes, with no public account of what work went undone to produce that refund. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kafka paints in \u201cBefore the Law,\u201d a man from the country who spends his entire life waiting at the door built specifically for him, seeking admission, endlessly told: not yet. He dies at the threshold. Only then is he informed that the door was his alone and is now being shut. Girish Mittal has been stuck since 2020 at a similar door. So has every citizen who gave money in April 2020 believing they\u2019d one day be told, in some auditable form, what it built. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two objections deserve to be taken seriously, because dismissing them would be dishonest of its own kind. \u201cDonor privacy protects people from harassment.\u201d This is true and justifiable for individual small donors, but that argument, examined closely, protects names, not aggregations. It does not explain why the institution\u2019s utilisation figures, agency identities and refund reasons (none of which \u201crisk\u201d anyone’s \u201cpersonal safety\u201d) remain equally opaque. \u201cThe urgency of 2020 called for informal and fast moves, so it is justified.\u201d Also true, one time. But urgency is a temporary condition, and PM CARES\u2019s opacity is a permanent set-up. An emergency justifies skipping paperwork for six months. It does not justify six years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These earlier defences don’t hold the way they used to. It is what happens whenever a definition meant for one situation (grammar for a checkpoint; privacy for a person; urgency for a crisis) is quietly stretched to cover a different one (a fund; an institution; a permanent structure). For how much time will Gongsun Long\u2019s trick run in the background of a nation\u2019s balance sheet? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To fix this issue: bring the fund under CAG audit, as already demanded in a pending Supreme Court petition, rather than leaving it to a private accountancy firm; legislate a sunset clause transferring the idle 93% into the RTI covered, parliament answerable PMNRF or National Disaster Response Fund, since the pandemic that justified PM CARES\u2019s existence has already ended twice over; and publish granular, names and amount data for the children’s scheme specifically, because those children are aging out of eligibility on our calendar but not on the csourt\u2019s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question this case actually poses, once the legal Latin is stripped away: if a fund chaired by the Prime Minister, filled with public money, can successfully argue in court that it reserves the informational privacy of a private citizen, what exactly stops the next government, of any party, from building ten more just like it? Not for pandemics. For anything. Elections have losers and winners; grammar, once it works, works for everyone who inherits the office next. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gongsun Long\u2019s white horse eventually got through the checkpoint; historical accounts differ on how, but the argument itself has never died. It changed vehicles. Six years ago it was Chinese casuistry. Today it is Section 8(1)(j). Tomorrow, if nobody closes the gap, it will be something else, and by then, the trick won’t even need explaining. It will simply be how public money moves around. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After all, it was a door, built for the public, that the public was never actually meant to walk through. Sarve bhavantu sukhina\u1e25.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In third-century BCE China, a logician named Gongsun Long stood at a border checkpoint. According to law, no horses could pass. Gongsun Long was leading a white horse. He argued, with total seriousness, that his horse should be let through because \u201cwhite horse\u201d is not the same category as \u201chorse.\u201d A horse names a shape. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":2444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[620],"class_list":["post-2443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-others"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/images-2.jpeg?fit=738%2C414&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2445,"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2443\/revisions\/2445"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2443"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iimun.in\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}