New Delhi: The Supreme Court ruled that money in the PM Cares Fund, a public charitable fund created to fight the Covid- 19 pandemic and national emergencies couldn’t be transferred to the statuary NDRF and chided the petitioner for making wholly misconceived and incorrect allegations that rules were tweaked to favour PMCF over NDRF.

A bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan, R.S. Reddy and M.R. Shah rebuked petitioner NGO Centre for Public Interest Litigation for making false statements about the Centre tweaking rules to shutout individual and corporate donations to NDRF and route those to PMCF. The bench said individual and corporate house could still donate to NDRF under the rules, which have been inplace since 2015-16. Dismissing the PIL of NGO CPIL, which was represented by senior advocate Dushyant Dave and Advocate Prashant Bhushan, it said, submission that after the new guidelines, it is not possible for any person or institution to make any contribution to the NDRF is, thus misconceived and incorrect.

According to section 46 (Of Disaster Management Act) as well as the new guidelines enforced with effect from financial year 2015-16, any person or institution can still make contribution to the NDRF. Secondly, the PMCF has been constituted in the year 2020 after outbreak of pandemic Covid- 19 where as the new guidelines came into force with effect from 2015-16, on which date the PMCF was not in existence, hence, the submission that new guidelines were amended to benefit the PMCF is wholly misconceived.

Justice Bhushan who wrote the 75 page Judgement, said, the PMCF is a public charitable trust and is not a Government Fund. The mere fact that Administration of the trust invested in trustees, i.e. a group of people, will itself take away the public character of the trust. The trust doesn’t receive any budgetary support or any Government money. It is not open for the petitioner to question the wisdom of the trustees to create the PMCF, which was constitutional with an objective to extend assistance in the wakeof a public health emergency that is Covid- 19 pandemic.

The PM is the Ex- officio Chairperson of PMCF with Ministers of Defense, Home and Finance as Ex-officio trustees. The PM can nominate three trustees to the board who are eminent in the fields of research, health, science, public administration and philanthropy. The SC said the pandemic highlighted the need for immediate enhancement in medical infrastructure and creation funds to contain Covid- 19. At this hour, no exception can be taken to the constitution of a public charitable trust, namely PMCF, to have necessary financial resources to meet the emergent situation, it said.