CPI(M) MP John Brittas slams Centre’s move to bar questions on PM CARES

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”.

Appeal to RS Chairman

In the strongly worded letter, Mr. Brittas contended that the Centre cannot “on the one hand, amend a Central law to give PM CARES statutory recognition, and on the other, claim it is not a concern of the Government of India.” Attempts to classify the fund as beyond parliamentary scrutiny, he wrote, is a “strike at the heart of parliamentary democracy”.

He urged the Rajya Sabha Chairman to reject any attempt by the Union Government to block questions on PM CARES and to uphold Parliament’s authority to examine all public interest entities linked to the Executive. “Parliamentary questions are the primary instrument through which the Legislature holds the Executive to account. To exclude from scrutiny a fund that operates in the public realm – enjoys official patronage, and commands public trust on the strength of its governmental association – is to create a zone of opacity that is alien to constitutional governance,” he said.