The Election Commission of India on Thursday made public the data on electoral bonds submitted to it by the State Bank of India, a move that is seen as a big step towards bringing transparency in political funding.
The SBI had submitted the details to the poll panel on Tuesday, a day after the Supreme Court gave a stern order and set a one-day deadline. The court had also directed the EC to publish the data on its website by March 15.
“The Election Commission of India has today uploaded the data on electoral bonds on its website as received from SBI on ‘as is where is basis’,” the poll panel said in a statement.
ECI has published the elector bond data in sheets. One gives the detail of purchasers of the Electoral Bonds from 12 April 2019 to 11 January 2024, and the other gives the detail of political parties that encashed Electoral Bonds from 12 April 2019 to 24 January 2024.
However, as the Electoral Bond Scheme was meant to be anonymous, the data published by ECI does not show who donated to which party. However, with careful study of body the sheet, it will be possible to make a rough estimate of the same.
Interestingly, as per the data, a total of 18,871 electoral bonds were purchased, but 20,421 bonds were encased by the parties. The total in the purchase sheet is ₹1,21,55,51,32,000.00, while the total in the recipient sheet is ₹1,27,69,08,93,000.00. The reason for this discrepancy is not clear.
At the first glance, it appears that Adani Group didn’t purchase any Electoral Bond. The name Reliance also does not appear in the list. Similarly, Serum Institute, Essar Group and GMR Group, alleged to have donate to BJP through, Prudent Electoral Trust, also do not appear in the list, and Prudent Electoral Trust is also not listed.
According to the data uploaded by the poll panel, the buyers of electoral bonds include Grasim Industries, Megha Engineering, Piramal Enterprises, Torrent Power, Bharti Airtel, DLF Commercial Developers, Vedanta Ltd., Apollo Tyres, Lakshmi Mittal, Edelweiss, PVR, Keventer, Sula Wine, Welspun, and Sun Pharma.
The parties that redeemed electoral bonds include the BJP, Congress, AIADMK, BRS, Shiv Sena, TDP, YSR Congress, DMK, JDS, NCP, Trinamool Congress, JDU, RJD, AAP, and the Samajwadi Party.
On March 11th, the Supreme Court dismissed SBI’s plea seeking an extension to disclose details of each electoral bond encashed by political parties before the scheme was scrapped last month.
