Yes, the PAN card is mandatory for LRS. On June 2019, the RBI made norms under the liberalized remittance scheme stricter by making the Permanent Account Number (PAN) compulsory even for transactions under $25,000.
Under the LRS, all resident individuals including minors can revoke upto 2,50,000 US dollars per financial year for current or capital account transactions or a combination of both.
According to an RBI statement, following the announcement made in the first bi-monthly Monetary Policy Statement 2018-19 on April 5, 2018, a system wherein banks will report daily transactions under the LRS has been put in place. This system helps the banks to see the remittances already sent by an individual during the financial year. This will enable the banks to keep track of, improve, and ensure compliance with the LRS limits.
Since the LRS reporting system fetches the aggregated remitter-wise data based on the PAN as the unique identifier, the PAN has been made mandatory.