E-Paper
Electoral bonds worth over ₹15,000 crore sold since 2018: SBI in RTI reply
The State Bank of India (SBI) is the only bank authorised to issue and encash electoral bonds.
As many as 27,133 or 55.9% of printed electoral bonds worth ₹15,956.3096 crore have been sold in 29 tranches since the inception of the Electoral Bond Scheme in 2018, the State Bank of India (SBI) said on Tuesday in a response to a right to information (RTI) request.
In the RTI response received by transparency activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (retd), it said that of the total bonds that were sold, 194 bonds worth ₹23.8874 crore were not encashed and thus transferred to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF).
In the 29th tranche, all of the 1,109 bonds issued between November 6 and November 20 were encashed, the SBI said.
Between April 2017 and March 2022, the PMNRF has collected ₹2,065.69 crore in total, as per the official website.
Since the electoral bond scheme was launched in 2018, 674,250 electoral bonds worth ₹28,531.5 crore have been printed by the India Security Press, Nashik, between 2019 and 2022.
The State Bank of India is the only bank authorised to issue and encash electoral bonds. It does not print the bonds, but its authorised branches acquire them from the government of India in different calendar years.
