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NEW DELHI: The State Bank of India, which was the only entity authorized to issue electoral bonds until the Supreme Court abandoned the program on February 15, has requested an extension of the deadline set by the SC for March 6 to June 30 for providing information to the Election Commission so that it can be posted on its website. The bank cites “practical difficulties” with bond decoding.

In order to help voters make an informed decision during elections, a five-judge bench unanimously declared that the 2018 program allowing anonymous, unlimited donations to political parties was unconstitutional. They also instituted a system that would make all donor information, donation amounts, and recipient parties publicly available.

If the Supreme Court grants SBI’s request for a 116-day extension of time, crucial information on political finance would stay hidden till the conclusion of the Lok Sabha elections.
CJI D Y Chandrachud and Justices Sanjiv Khanna, B R Gavai, J B Pardiwala, and Manoj Misrahad made up the five-judge panel that issued the instruction on February 15. The bench said, “SBI shall submit details of electoral bonds purchased since the interim order of this court dated April 12, 2019, to date to ECI.” The information must include the date of purchase of each electoral bond, the buyer’s name, and the kind of bond that was bought. Within a week of receiving the information—that is, by March 13, 2024—ECI would post the information given by SBI on its official website.”
SBI explained the size of the assignment by stating that 22,217 EBs were used to make contributions to different political parties between April 12, 2019, and February 15 of this year.

At the conclusion of each phase, licensed branches submitted redeemed EBs in sealed envelopes to the Mumbai Main Branch. This would require the decoding, compilation, and comparison of a total of 44,434 information sets, in addition to the existence of two distinct information silos, the statement said.

According to the SBI, “Due to the stringent measures undertaken to ensure that the identity of the donors was kept anonymous, ‘decoding’ of the electoral bonds and the matching of the donor to the donations made would be a complex process.”
According to the statement, up to 29 SBI branches nationwide have been given permission to sell and redeem EBs.

“Details of purchases made at the branches are not maintained centrally at any one place, such as the name of the purchaser or donor, which could be tallied with the date of issue, place of issue (branch), denomination of the bond, and bond number,” added the statement.
Each political party was required to maintain a designated account in any of the 29 authorized branches where EB amounts were deposited. “Donor details were kept in a sealed cover at the designated branches, and all such sealed covers were deposited in the main branch of the applicant bank, which is in Mumbai,” SBI stated.

“The two sets of data were being kept apart from one another. There would be a lot of work involved in getting them to match again. The date of issuance of each bond must be compared to the date of purchase by a specific donor in order to provide donor information. The first information silo would be the only one covered in this experiment. The political parties redeemed these bonds into the appropriate bank accounts. As a result, SBI said that this data would then need to be compared with the bond redemption data that comprises the second silo.
It said that the goal of not saving all information digitally was to make sure that it could not be readily acquired in order to fulfill the scheme’s anonymity goal.