SBI Seeks Deadline Extension Till June 30 For Furnishing Electoral Bonds Data

The State Bank of India has filed a plea before the Supreme Court seeking an extension of its March 6 deadline to furnish data pertaining to the electoral bonds scheme.

The public sector bank has asked for an extension up until June 30 to furnish all the data.

According to the top court's electoral bonds judgement, SBI was directed to furnish the details of electoral bonds that were purchased since April 12, 2019, to the Election Commission of India.

In its plea, SBI has requested an extension, citing certain "practical difficulties" with the decoding exercise and the timeline fixed for it.

Due to the stringent measures undertaken to ensure that the identity of the donors was kept anonymous, the “decoding” of the electoral bonds and the matching of the donors to the donations made would be a complex process, the plea states.

In its application before the court, SBI has submitted that details of donors were kept in sealed covers in designated branches of the bank and were then deposited in a sealed cover at the Mumbai branch of the bank.

Further, it states that each political party was required to maintain a designated account in any of the 29 authorised branches where it could receive donations. At the time of redemption, the original bond and the pay-in slip were stored in a sealed cover and sent to the Mumbai branch of SBI.

Since both sets of information were being stored independently of each other, rematching them would be a task requiring a significant amount of effort, the plea states.

Last month, the top court, in a unanimous ruling, struck down the electoral bond scheme as unconstitutional.

The electoral bonds scheme was introduced by the government in 2017 and was subsequently notified in 2018.

According to the scheme, any person who is a citizen of India or incorporated could purchase these bonds and donate them in favour of any registered political party that had secured at least 1% of the votes polled in the last election to the Lok Sabha or the state legislative assembly.

These bonds were sold in denominations of Rs 1000, Rs 10,000, Rs 1 lakh, Rs 10 lakh, and Rs 1 crore from authorised branches of the State Bank of India.