PM CARES: Donations drop, interests accrue, utilisation abysmal
Audited financial statements for the PM-CARES fund reveal a significant drop in donations and extremely low fund utilization over the past two years. The corpus growth is primarily driven by interest income rather than new contributions.
Why it matters
The lack of transparency and low utilization of public funds during emergency-related initiatives often sparks political debate regarding government accountability.
The audited financial statements of Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations (PM-CARES) Fund, released together on Tuesday for the financial years of 2023-24 and 2024-25 after a delay of two years, showed that while donations have dropped the utilisation of available funds was abysmally low.
The corpus grew by 25.8% between 2022-23 and 2024-25 from ₹ 6,722 crore to ₹ 8,453 crore. However, in the same period, the utilisation dropped from ₹437.9 crore to just ₹87.5 lakh, which was just 0.01% or 10,000 times smaller than the available corpus.
The money flowing into the funds through donations and interests from corpus far exceeded the money disbursed since 2022-23.
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