New Delhi, Sept 03: Following up the pattern he had set for himself when he was the chief minister of Gujarat, the prime minister Narendra Modi’s has donated more than Rs 103 crores from his personal savings or the proceeds accrued from the auction of the gifts he received in his official capacity, to various public causes. But most of his donations have gone to the persons and organisations working for girls’ education and cleaning of Ganga, official sources said here on Thursday.
The latest among his donations was the initial corpus of Rs 2.25 lakh to the PM CARES Fund, which was set up in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak to support relief of any kind relating to a public health emergency or any other kind of emergency, calamity or distress. The Fund, set up in March, received Rs 3,076.62 crore in first five days of its formation, the sources said.
Among the list of recipients of his donations to the public causes was Rs 21 lakh he gave in 2019 from his personal savings to the corpus fund set up for the welfare of sanitation workers of Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj. After receiving the Seoul Peace Prize in South Korea in 2019, the prime minister had announced that the entire prize money of Rs 1.30 crore would be given to the Namami Gange project, aimed at cleaning Ganga river. He also donated for the same cause another Rs 3/40 crores recently collected from auctioning of mementoes he received as the prime minister, the sources said.
The sources said Modi had donated Rs 21 lakh from his personal savings towards the education of Gujarat government staff’s daughter after he quit as the state chief minister in 2014 to take over as the prime minister. He had also raised Rs 89.96 crore by auctioning all gifts he received as chief minister and donated this to the Kanya Kelavani Fund, a scheme for education of the girl child.
The prime minister had also initiated the auctioning of gifts he received till then in 2015, and Rs 8.35 crore were raised, with the amount channeled to the Namami Gange Mission, sources said.
(Manas Dasgupta)