As the Supreme Court hears petitions challenging the validity of electoral bonds, information gathered from Right to Information applications made by transparency activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (Retd) reveals that bonds worth a whopping Rs 14,940 crore have been sold between March 2018 and October 2023.
The first tranche of electoral bonds were made available on March 1, 2018, and the bonds have since then been sold by the State Bank of India, the sole authorised vendor of the instrument, in 28 phases— the latest being in October this year just before the Assembly elections.
As per the information gathered by Batra through various RTI applications made to the SBI, electoral bonds worth Rs 1,49,40,27,86,000, or more than Rs 14,940 crore, have been sold so far. Significantly, 14,094 crore bonds, or 94.336 per cent of the bonds sold, were in the denomination of Rs 1 crore each.
Compared to this, only 1.56 lakh bonds sold were of Rs 1,000 value each, or just 0.0001 per cent of the total bonds sold. Over 812 crore bonds sold were worth Rs 10 lakh each (5.4356 per cent), 33.9 crore bonds sold were worth Rs 1 lakh each (0.2269 per cent), and 26.3 lakh bonds sold were worth Rs 10,000 each (0.0018 per cent).
Those opposed to the electoral bonds scheme have pointed out that the fact that majority of the bonds sold are of the denomination of Rs 1 crore shows that the bonds are being purchased mostly by business entities, where an expectation of quid pro quo could be involved, and not by the common man.
Meanwhile, as per information gathered by Batra on the latest round of sale of electoral bonds between October 4 and 13, right before the Assembly elections in five states, bonds worth Rs 1,148 crore were sold. As much as 95.352 per cent of the bonds sold were of denomination of Rs 1 crore each, and maximun bonds were sold in Hyderabad.
