A public interest plea has requested the Supreme Court to declare the PM-Cares Fund illegal and direct that all donations towards Covid-19 relief be credited to the National Disaster Response Fund and State Disaster Response Funds.

The joint petition from four Allahabad residents has also sought a directive to the Centre and the states to conduct “house-to-house” coronavirus tests, arguing the official infection count may be a “gross underestimate”. The plea is expected to come up for hearing next week.

The Centre has asked people and institutions to contribute to the newly created PM-Cares Fund, offering a tax relief, and various government bodies are prodding staff to send their Covid-19 donations only to this fund. But critics have dubbed the fund an unnecessary addition to the NDRF and an attempt at self-aggrandisement.

The petitioners — advocates Shashwat Anand, Ankur Azad and Faiz Ahmad and law student Sagar — have said the PM-Cares Fund and various similar funds created by chief ministers lack statutory backing while the NDRF and the SDRFs are mandated by the Disaster Management Act, 2005.

Such statutory support would prevent misuse of the funds, they have argued.

“There is a competition and clash of interests between the statutory and non-statutory funds, and in the course of time the NDRF/SDRF would lose (their) relevance and worth. Manifestly, the (new) trusts have trenched on the field of the NDRF/SDRF, the statutory fund(s), and are as such redundant and void,” the petition says.

“The Prime Minister is calling for money and promoting the non-statutory ‘PM-Cares Fund’ instead of calling for money and promoting the NDRF which is the statutory fund.... The new trust being contrary to the 2005 act and the statutory fund of NDRF is void ab initio (illegal from the outset).”

The petition argues that the state-level trusts formed by various chief ministers to receive pandemic donations, parallel to the SDRFs, are similarly void.

Door-to-door tests

House-to-house tests are necessary for “tracing, identifying, isolating infected persons” and “to break the chains of transmission, desirably starting with the states and cities which are the most severely affected”, the petitioners have argued.

They have said the official count of confirmed Covid-19 cases is likely to be a “gross underestimate as the testing rate in India is among the lowest in the world”.

“The shocking spike in the number of corona-infected cases within a matter of days shows that it may only be the tip of the iceberg and (that) we’re oblivious to the gravity of the situation.”

Quoting figures provided by the Indian Council of Medical Research, the petition says that a mere 114,015 samples had been tested by April 7, which is just over 82 tests per one million people in a country of more than 1.38 billion.

“Hence, testing as per the current testing strategy... is inadequate, insufficient and potentially dangerous and devastating as it excludes and leaves out the asymptomatic individuals who have travel history and those individuals who are asymptomatic but (had) indirect contact (with infected people) and... may be carriers,” the petition says.