Govt just lately printed 10k electoral bonds price Rs 1 cr every, reveals RTI reply

The most up-to-date tranche of electoral bonds went on sale from October 1 to October 10, within the run-up to the Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat elections.

The final time the federal government printed electoral bonds was in 2019, when bonds price Rs 11,400 crore in several denominations have been printed on the India Security Press in Nashik, in keeping with the October 29 reply by SBI to RTI activist Kanhaiya Kumar.

SBI, the one financial institution authorised by the federal government to promote electoral bonds, mentioned in the identical reply that 10,000 electoral bonds price Rs 1 crore have been printed within the calendar 12 months 2022. In reply to Kumar’s earlier RTI question with the identical query, SBI had on August 1 offered particulars of the printing of electoral bonds in 2018 and 2019 as the one situations of the identical.

Asked whether or not the expenditure incurred on printing of the electoral bonds was borne by the exchequer or the purchaser of the bond, SBI in its October 29 reply said: “The stationary is acquired from GoI [Government of India] by SBI for Sale at its Authorised Branches (sic).”

Citing information offered by SBI in its latest reply, Kumar mentioned the federal government had printed 10,000 of the brand new Rs 1 crore-denomination electoral bonds even when 5,068 of the bonds with the identical denomination have been mendacity unsold after the sale of a tranche in July. Since the beginning of the scheme in 2018, the federal government has printed 24,650 Rs 1 crore-denomination bonds to this point, promoting 10,108 of them.

Over the years, the electoral bonds of Rs 1 crore denomination, that are the best denomination accessible within the scheme, have been the preferred selection for corporates and people who purchase the bonds to provide to political events. According to SBI’s reply, about 94 per cent of the worth of complete electoral bonds bought to this point have been within the type of bonds of Rs 1 crore denomination. The scheme additionally consists of bonds with denominations of Rs 1,000, Rs 10,000, Rs 1 lakh and Rs 10 lakh. These, nevertheless, discover few takers.

Asked for the phase-wise and denomination-wise particulars of unsold electoral bonds since 2018, SBI mentioned the data was not accessible centrally because the authorised branches have been those promoting the bonds.

On August 19, India Security Press mentioned in its reply to RTI activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired) that the federal government had spent Rs 1.85 crore on the printing of electoral bonds to this point. The variety of electoral bonds printed until then — 6,64,250 — didn’t embody the just lately printed 10,000 Rs 1-crore denomination bonds as talked about in SBI’s RTI reply to Kumar.

On June 16, the Central Information Commission had ordered India Security Press to supply the small print of the fee and related prices of printing of electoral bonds to Batra. The authorities press had earlier declined to provide the data to Batra saying that its disclosure would adversely have an effect on the financial pursuits of the nation.