Electoral bonds worth Rs 676.2 crore were sold between November 9 and November 15 when the campaigning for the Gujarat Assembly polls was in full swing, a Right To Information (RTI) reply by the State Bank of India (SBI) on Thursday said. In response to Bihar-based RTI activist Kanhaiya Kumar's application, information provided by the SBI stated that the Mumbai branch of the bank remained the top choice for buyers, selling Rs 309.4 crore worth of electoral bonds, followed by Delhi with a sale of Rs 225.4 crore, Hyderabad (Rs 89 crore), Gandhinagar (Rs 37.5 crore, Jaipur (Rs 5.81 crore), Kolkata (Rs 5 crore), Bengaluru (Rs 3 crore), and Chandigarh (Rs 1 crore). The SBI reply stated that out of 954 bonds of various denominations that were sold in the 23rd tranche from November 9 to November 15, all but one bond of Rs 1,000 denomination was encashed. Most of the bonds (Rs 660.2 crore) were encashed at SBI’s branch in New Delhi, where national parties are based. The only other branch where electoral bonds worth Rs 16 crore were encashed this time was Hyderabad. This was the first tranche of electoral bonds since the Union Finance Ministry on November 7 amended the Electoral Bond Scheme-2018 to allow an additional 15 days of sales in a year with an Assembly election. Till then, electoral bonds were sold by SBI through four 10-day windows in January, April, July and October, and an additional 30 days in a year of Lok Sabha polls. The 24th tranche of electoral bonds was announced by the government last week and are on sale from December 5 to December 12. The scheme started in March 2018, after being announced in the Budget 2017-18 by then-Finance Minister Arun Jaitley with an avowed goal of increasing transparency of political funding.
