Bonds are sold in two forms, digital and physical, under the Electoral Bonds Scheme, 2018. An RTI reply has revealed that most of the bonds sold in 8 out of 22 rounds since March 2018 were physical transactions. Before many assembly elections, the figure of physical bonds was much higher than digital.
New Delhi: The Right to Information (RTI) has revealed that the sale of physical electoral bonds considered opaque, in the period before the 2018 assembly elections, the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and the upcoming Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh assembly elections – led to digital transactions of these bonds. had crossed.
On an average, from the first round of sale of electoral bonds in March 2018 to the 22nd round in October this year, 54.18 per cent of the total 19,520 transactions were digital transactions, in which bonds worth Rs 10,791 crore were sold.
According to the Indian Express, with only 11.92 per cent of physical transactions taking place in the first round of sales in March 2018, preference for physical bonds has seen volatility during these years.
The 23rd tranche of bond sales this year began on Wednesday (November 9) and will close on November 15.
According to the reply received from State Bank of India (SBI) to RTI activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (Retd), most of the bonds sold in eight out of 22 rounds of bond sales so far were physical transactions. These transactions took place in the 2018 Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Rajasthan and Telangana elections; Lok Sabha elections in 2019; And this year before the Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh elections.
The bond sales tranches for May, July, October and November 2018 witnessed physical selling at 57.84, 87.40, 54.98 and 63.42 per cent, respectively.
The bond sales tranches for March and April 2019 witnessed physical selling of 56.60 and 52.51 per cent, respectively.
At the same time, in 2022 this year, bond sales in July and October accounted for 56.46 and 50.07 percent, respectively, of physical sales.
In the year 2017, when the Electoral Bond Scheme-2018 was being prepared, the Finance Ministry and RBI had discussed ways to sell the bonds and it was decided to sell them in digital or physical form.
On 14 September 2017, RBI Governor Urjit Patel had conveyed RBI’s concerns regarding the physical mode to the then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley as well as against the objectives of digitisation. He advocated the sale of bonds in electronic form (Demat).
Whereas the Finance Ministry in response to this told the Governor that the demat format of electoral bonds is against the objective of the scheme to protect the identity of the donor.
Even in the meeting of Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg with the Election Commission, this issue had come up. The then Election Commissioner OP Rawat had suspected that electoral bonds could be misused by shell companies.
OP Rawat, who retired from his post in 2018, told The Indian Express on Wednesday, “The whole plan is opaque. Only the branch manager of SBI will know the KYC details. Many donors will not want to pay from their company accounts and will instead use some shell companies. The system is not capable of preventing fraud in other transactions and here the transactions are opaque,’
Batra said that the documents show that the RBI is in favor of digital transactions, while the government is emphasizing on protecting the identity of the donors, while the same government also talks about digitization.