The Election Commission of India on 21th March published the detailed Electoral Bond data submitted by the State Bank of India on the orders of the Supreme Court of India. This data includes the Alphanumeric numbers corresponding to each electoral bond purchased by donors and encashed by political parties. Although the data has been published in two separate PDF files, it is possible to link donors with parties, using the Alphanumeric provided by SBI.
After analysing the data, it can be seen that Future Gaming and Hotel Services Private Limited, the scam-tainted lottery company, donated a whopping ₹542 Crore to Trinamool Congress. Earlier DMK had disclosed that it received ₹509 from the Company. Now, it can be seen that TMC received the highest amount from the company.
Notably, the amount DMK received from the company, as per the data published yesterday, is ₹503 crore, while the company had declared an amount of ₹509 crore. Similarly, there are mismatch in the data for purchasers and the data for political parties. While there are 20,421 rows in the party data, there are only 18,871 rows in the donor file, with a difference of 1550 records.
This is because, the data is only for the period from 12 April 2019 to 11 January 2024, the period for which the Supreme Court had sought the data. As the Electoral Bond Scheme was launched in January 2018, data for more than a year is included in the data published by SBI. As a result, bonds that were purchased before 12 April 2019 but encashed by parties after that date, have been included in the party data but missing from the donor data. Similarly, Electoral Bonds which were purchased during the last two weeks before 11 January 2024 but not encashed by the parties yet, are seen in the purchaser data but missing from the party data.
This has meant that, in the political party list, there are 1680 such Electoral Bond numbers which are not found in the Purchaser list, amounting to ₹623.21 crore. Similarly, there are 130 Electoral Bond numbers in the purchaser data which are not present in the party list, and the total amount for these bonds are ₹9.63 crore. As a result, there are a total of 1,810 Electoral bonds which can’t be linked to both donors and parties, and total amount of such bonds is ₹632.84 crore.
For the purpose of this report, we have considered only those electoral bonds that are present in both purchaser and party files. Therefore, the numbers reflected here are less than individual numbers for parties and donors.
Coming back to Future Gaming, it can be seen that the company donated ₹542 crore to TMC, ₹503 crore and ₹154 crore to YSR Congress party. BJP was the fourth highest recipient with ₹100 crore.
The second largest donor through electoral bonds is Megha Engineering, and there were allegations by the left-liberal camp that the company donated heavily to BJP in exchange for getting large infrastructure projects. The data shows that although BJP received ₹584 crore, the highest amount of donation from the company, it also made significant donations to non-NDA parties like BRS (₹195 crore), DMK (₹85 crore) and YSR Congress (₹37 crore) etc.
Qwik Supply Chain Private Limited, a logistic partner of Reliance group, donated ₹375 crore to BJP through electoral bonds. The company also gave ₹25 crore to Shiv Sena and ₹10 crore to NCP.
Another top donor was Haldia Energy Limited, which gave ₹281 crore to TMC. On the other hand, the top donation by Vedanta Group was for BJP, at ₹230 crore.
If we look at partywise data for top receivers of Electoral Bonds, we can see that Megha Engineering, Qwik Supply Chain, Vedanta, Bharti Airtel and Mandanlal Ltd were the top five donors of BJP. Among these, Megha Engineering gave ₹584 crore, which the highest amount given to a company by a single donor during the period. Among the top 10 donors for BJP, the top 9 gave over ₹100 crore.
TMC, the second-highest recipient of Electoral Bonds, received ₹542 crore from Future Gaming, the second-highest amount given to a party by a single donor. TMC also got ₹281 crore from Haldia Energy.
Congress received the highest amount of ₹125 crore from Vedanta, followed by ₹110 crore from Western UP Power. The party got ₹50 crore from Future Gaming.
BJD received most of the contributions from companies involved in mining and related industries, like Essel Mining (₹174.5 crore), Jindal Steel (₹100 crore), Utkal Alumina (₹70 crore) etc.
Megha Engineering was top donor for BRS with ₹195 crore, followed by Yashoda Super Speciality Hospital (₹94 crore).
DMK received almost all of electoral bonds from just company, Future Gaming and Megha Engineering. The party received must less amounts from some other donors.
AAP received a total of ₹65.25 crore in electoral bonds during this period from companies like Aveer Trading, Bajaj Auto, MKJ Enterprise, Torrent Power etc.
As mentioned above, the numbers given here are for only those Electoral Bonds that are present in both donor and party data. We have excluded 1,810 records worth ₹632.84 crore which are present in only one dataset. Therefore, the actual amounts received by parties and donated by the purchasers of Electoral Bonds will be higher.
