The union minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, has hit out at political opponents who were demanding accountability for the PM-CARES Fund. While he claimed that “transparency was writ large” in the way the fund functions, it’s curious that the prime minister’s office continues to block legitimate queries about it.
In late August, I filed an RTI application seeking various details of the charitable trust under which the PM-CARES Fund had been registered, and which State regulatory authority was monitoring the trust. But I was refused information on the grounds that the fund was not a public authority.
However, this assertion does not pass muster. Back in 2007, a similar situation arose with regards to a request for information about the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF), which has received public contributions since it was set up in 1948 by India’s first prime…