The electoral bond scheme came under the scanner soon after it was launched for being opaque and possibly routing unaccounted money to political parties.
Electoral bonds worth more than Rs 570 crores have been sold in the latest phase of the electoral bond sale that lasted from January 2 to January 11, 2024, a Right to Information (RTI) query filed by transparency activist Commodore Lokesh Batra has revealed.
This is the second batch of electoral bonds sold since the Supreme Court began hearing four petitions challenging the scheme’s validity in November last year, and the 30th batch sold since the scheme was launched in 2018.
According to the State Bank of India’s (SBI’s) reply to Batra’s query, electoral bonds worth Rs 5,71,80,03,000 have been sold across SBI branches in Bangalore, Chennai, Gandhinagar, Kolkata, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Visakhapatnam, Mumbai and Jaipur.
Of the 897 bonds – sold in the denomination of Rs 1,000, Rs 10,000, Rs 1 lakh and Rs 1 crore – 415, or nearly half, have been sold in Kolkata.
The maximum number of bonds (540) have been sold in the denomination of Rs 1 crore with 161 in Kolkata, followed by Hyderabad (131) and Chennai (73). The money mobilised thorough bonds in the denomination of Rs 1 crore make up for 94.4% of the total money in circulation through electoral bonds in this phase….
After the truth-shower 