New Delhi: The PM CARES Fund, a ‘public charitable trust for having a dedicated fund with the primary objective of dealing with any kind of emergency or distress situation, like that posed by the COVID-19 pandemic’ in 2020, logged Rs 8,452 crore in receipts in the financial year 2024-25, as per its audit report.
However, it used a little over Rs 87 lakh in payments. That is less than 1 per cent of the total funds.
Available on the PM CARES website, the report shows that fixed deposits of Rs 7,846 crore accounted for the lion’s share of the closing balance.
Interest from these fixed deposits earned the fund Rs 469 crore during the year, making it its largest source of income. The sizeable deposits allowed the fund to generate substantial returns even as donations declined.
Meanwhile, there was a drop in domestic donations; from Rs 681.8 crore in FY25, it was down to Rs 479.05 crore in FY25.
Foreign donations also added up to Rs 92.8 lakh in this period, as against Rs 1.13 crore in FY24. The overall picture is still a promising one for the Trust, as total receipts were still higher in this period in comparison to the last financial year.
The figures show that while total receipts increased during FY25, donations from both domestic and foreign sources declined, while interest from fixed deposits accounted for the largest share of the fund’s income.
If one looks at the payments, they also dropped drastically to Rs 87 lakh in FY25 from Rs 15.59 crore in FY24.
What the public says
Meanwhile, social media has been in a tizzy ever since the reports were made public. As an X user pointed out, the Trust utilised barely .01 per cent of the total funds available. “Why is the PMCARES Fund keeping such large sums of money idle?” a user asked.
“A fund set up to help citizens during disasters, which has accumulated thousands of crores (including from foreign sources), is shrouded in secrecy. Still, no information is available on the sources of funds. The PMCARES Fund continues to evade public scrutiny by refusing to submit itself to the RTI Act,” she said.
“A fund of this scale sitting largely idle raises serious questions about deployment intent,” noted another.
