The government has printed 10,000 electoral bonds worth Rs 1 crore each this calendar year, the
State Bank of India said in a Right to Information (RTI) reply. The government had previously printed electoral bonds worth Rs 11,400 crore in different denominations in 2019 at the India Security Press in Nashik, Indian Express quoted the SBI as saying in an October 29 reply to RTI activist Kanhaiya Kumar.
The recent tranche of electoral bonds worth Rs 545.25 crore went on sale between October 1 and 10, ahead of the elections in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) received the bulk of the contribution, another RTI revealed.
An electoral bond is similar to a promissory note that can be bought by corporates or Indian citizens from select branches of the
State Bank of India and donated to a political party of their choice. Electoral bonds were introduced in 2018 as an alternative to cash donations to bring transparency to political funding.
Prior to this year, electoral bonds were printed in 2018 and 2019.
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However, the move to print 10,000 of the new Rs 1 crore-denomination electoral bonds comes at a time when there are 5,068 bonds with the same denomination lying unsold after the sale of a tranche in July, Kumar said citing data provided by SBI in its recent reply.
Due to the lack of centrally-available information, SBI was unable to provide phase-wise and denomination-wise details of unsold electoral bonds since 2018.
The government has printed 24,650 Rs 1 crore-denomination bonds since they were introduced in 2018 and sold 10,108 of them. Electoral bonds of Rs 1 crore denomination are the highest available in the scheme. They are popular among corporates that give them to political parties.
The SBI, the only bank authorised by the government to sell electoral bonds, said that 94 percent of the value of total electoral bonds sold till now came from those of Rs 1 crore denomination. Electoral bonds of other denominations such as Rs 1,000, Rs 10,000, Rs 1 lakh and Rs 10 lakh are also sold, even though they find few takers.
The government had spent Rs 1.85 crore on the printing of electoral bonds so far, India Security Press said in an RTI reply on August 19. Till then, 6,64,250 electoral bonds had been printed, which did not include the recently printed 10,000 Rs 1-crore denomination bonds.
In a separate response to an RTI application filed by Commodore Lokesh Batra (retd), the SBI wrote that a total of 741 electoral bonds have been sold during the 22nd tranche, which was conducted from October 1. The bank said 96 percent of this was of the denomination of Rs 1 crore each. Nearly 90 percent of these went to four parties including the BJP, the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party, and the Trinamool Congress, Hindustan Times reported.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
