The audited financial statements of Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations (PM-CARES) Fund, released together on Tuesday for the financial years of 2023-24 and 2024-25 after a delay of two years, showed that while donations have dropped the utilisation of available funds was abysmally low.

The corpus grew by 25.8% between 2022-23 and 2024-25 from ₹ 6,722 crore to ₹ 8,453 crore. However, in the same period, the utilisation dropped from ₹437.9 crore to just ₹87.5 lakh, which was just 0.01% or 10,000 times smaller than the available corpus.