10-day sale of 19th tranche of electoral bonds to begin today

The sale of the first batch of electoral bonds took place from March 1-10, 2018. The 18th tranche of the bond sale took place from September 1 to September 10, 2021. An electoral bond will be valid for 15 days from the date of issue.

The sale of the 19th tranche of electoral bonds will begin from Saturday. The issuance of these bonds was approved by the central government on Thursday, ahead of the assembly elections in next few months. The sale will go on till January 10.

Electoral bonds are issued by the State Bank of India (SBI) for amounts ranging from ₹1,000 to ₹1 crore.(Bloomberg Photo)

The elections are due in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Goa.

"State Bank of India (SBI), in the XIX Phase of sale, has been authorised to issue and encash Electoral Bonds through its 29 Authorized Branches with effect from January 1 to January 10, 2022," the finance ministry said in a statement. SBI is the only authorised bank to issue such bonds.

The 29 specified SBI branches are in cities, such as Lucknow, Shimla, Dehradun Kolkata, Guwahati, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Patna, New Delhi, Chandigarh, Srinagar, Gandhinagar, Bhopal, Raipur, and Mumbai.

The sale of the first batch of electoral bonds took place from March 1-10, 2018. The 18th tranche of the bond sale took place from September 1 to September 10, 2021.

What are electoral bonds?

Electoral bonds have been pitched as an alternative to cash donations made to political parties as part of efforts to bring transparency in political funding.

The electoral bonds can be purchased by a person who is a citizen of India or incorporated or established in India, according to the finance ministry.

According to government rules, only the political parties registered under Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 (43 of 1951) and which secured not less than one per cent of the votes polled in the last general election to the House of the People or the Legislative Assembly of a state, will be eligible to receive the electoral bonds.

An electoral bond will be valid for 15 days from the date of issue. No payment would be made to any payee political party if the bond is deposited after the expiry of the validity period.

Supreme Court nod

In March last year, the Supreme Court had cleared the sale of the electoral bonds ahead of elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry.

The court told petitioner, NGO Association for Democratic Reforms, that the sale of these bonds have continued “without any impediment” in 2018, 2019 and 2020.