close
Breaking news

Meghalaya Governor Satya Pal Malik’s stand has not softened even after th...read moreAll You Need to Know About Cryptocurrency in India: Trends, Legality and Taxa...read more The Champaran Foundation, in collaboration with InFeed, organised an online e...read more In one of the biggest leaks ever of offshore financial records, the Internation...read more The Champaran Foundation, in collaboration with InFeed, is inviting entries fo...read more The recently concluded German elections on September 26, 2021 have given a divid...read more According to latest news reports, China has been on a defense infrastructure rev...read more A new line of argument has already come to dominate the public sphere: it’...read more The government has gone one step further to detect community spread of the coro...read more The government has issued an order to abolish the six allowances, including the...read more Aarogya Setu application launched by NIC is aimed to track COVID-19 affected pe...read more SEOUL| South Korea’s unemployment rate was unchanged in April as the coronavi...read more Amid the outbreak of Corona pandemic in the country, Indian government has been...read more Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his address to the nation on Tuesday indicated ...read more Corona infection in the country is taking a macabre form. So far, more than 74 ...read more Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has written a letter to UP Chi...read more On Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a package of Rs 20 lakh cror...read more

RTI reveals – More than ₹ 2000 crores of PSU money used to fill PM CARES Fund

As the PM CARES fund lies outside the ambit of Section 2(h) of RTI Act, no query on how the fund is being used has been answered either.

38 PSUs have used the money from their Corporate Social Responsibility funds to contribute ₹ 2,105 crores to the Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance & Relief in Emergency Situations (PM CARES) fund, records accessed under the RTI Act show.

The report published by the Indian Express comes at a time when opposition parties especially the Congress has been questioning the Modi government for lack of transparency in the usage of the Fund.

The Indian Express sent RTI queries to 55 PSUs and received, until August 13, responses from 38, which showed that they contributed a total of Rs 2,105.38 crore over the past five months from budgetary allocations in 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.

Among the 38 PSUs the top donor is Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) with ₹ 300 crores.
NTPC is the second highest donor contributing ₹ 250 crores to the Fund.
However, ONGC has acknowledged that they have made the donation even though they are yet to finalize the budgetary allocation for the financial year 2020-21.
Meanwhile, Power Finance Corporation acknowledged that they crossed the total CSR limit for 2020-21 and donated ₹ 50 crore more than the initial budgetary allocation.
On the other hand, SAIL has revealed that they donated ₹ 33 crores to PM CARES fund even though they have not made any profit in the last three years.

Although the Modi government has assured that all contributions made to PM CARES fund are voluntary, the presence of public sector undertakings in the list of major donors leaves enough room for doubt. As the PSUs though operating independently still have the Government of India as the majority shareholder which provides enough room for the government to influence PSU’s decisions.

The PMO so far has refused to reveal the list of all the donors and the contributions made by them. As the PM CARES fund lies outside the ambit of Section 2(h) of RTI Act, no query on how the fund is being used has been answered either.

Tags: , ,

Story Page