SBI: 22k poll bonds issued between April 2019 and February 2024 | India News

In its Feb 15 directive, a five-judge bench of CJI D Y Chandrachud and Justices Sanjiv Khanna, B R Gavai, J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misrahad had stated, “SBI shall submit particulars of Electoral Bonds bought for the reason that interim order of this courtroom dated 12 April 2019 until date to ECI. The small print shall embody the date of buy of every Electoral Bond, the identify of the purchaser of the bond and the denomination of Electoral Bond bought…ECI shall publish the data shared by SBI on its official web site inside one week of the receipt of the data, that’s, by March 13, 2024.”
Explaining the enormity of the duty, SBI stated between April 12, 2019, and Feb 15 this yr, 22,217 EBs had been used for making donations to numerous political events.

“Redeemed EBs had been deposited to Mumbai Primary Department by the authorised branches on the finish of every section in sealed envelopes. Coupled with the truth that two completely different data silos existed, this might imply {that a} whole of 44,434 data units must be decoded, compiled, and in contrast,” it stated.
SBI stated, “Because of the stringent measures undertaken to make sure that the identification of the donors was stored nameless, ‘decoding’ of the electoral bonds and the matching of the donor to the donations made can be a fancy course of.”

It stated as many as 29 branches of SBI throughout India had been authorised on the market and redemption of EBs.
“Particulars of purchases made on the Branches are usually not maintained centrally at anybody place, such because the identify of Purchaser/Donor which might be tallied with Date of Situation, Place of Situation (Department), Denomination of Bond, Bond Quantity,” it stated.

“Donor particulars had been stored in a sealed cowl on the designated branches and all such sealed covers had been deposited within the Primary Department of the Applicant financial institution, which is in Mumbai,” SBI stated, including that every political occasion was required to take care of a delegated account in any of the 29 authorised branches the place EB quantities had been deposited.

“Each units of knowledge had been being saved independently of one another. To re-match them can be a process requiring a major quantity of effort. To make accessible donor data, the date of difficulty of every bond must be checked and matched in opposition to the date of buy by a selected donor. This train would solely cope with the primary silo of knowledge. These bonds had been redeemed by the political events of their designated financial institution accounts. Accordingly, this data would then should be matched in opposition to the bond redemption data that makes up the second silo,” SBI defined.
It stated that the aim of not storing all particulars digitally was to make sure that it can’t be gathered simply to realize the anonymity object of the scheme.