Contesting the directions from Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to the Lok Sabha Secretariat that no questions on PM CARES Fund should be admitted, since the fund is entirely made up of voluntary public contributions and not any government allocation, CPI(M)’s Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas said such a stance is not legally sustainable.
The PMO, on January 30, issued directions to the Lok Sabha Secretariat on the issue. In this context, Mr. Brittas, in a letter to Rajya Sabha Chairman C.P. Radhakrishnan on Tuesday (February 10, 2026), urged him to “summarily” reject such directions, to maintain the constitutional hierarchy between Parliament and the Executive.
The letter warned that preventing MPs from raising questions on funds that enjoy official patronage, public trust, and substantial contributions risks creating a “zone of opacity alien to Constitutional governance”.
Criticising the Centre’s bid to exclude the fund from parliamentary scrutiny, Mr. Brittas argued that this position is internally inconsistent and contrary to the government’s own records. He cited the Ministry of Corporate Affairs’s March 2020 office memorandum, which explicitly recognised PM CARES as a Central Government-established fund eligible for CSR contributions under the Companies Act. He further noted that the Act was amended in May 2020 to expressly include PM CARES in Schedule VII – a statutory acknowledgement impossible if the fund were truly “outside government responsibility”.
