Supreme Court asks SBI to disclose numbers of electoral bonds

March 15, 2024 11:09 am | Updated 12:00 pm IST

The Supreme Court on Friday, March 15, 2024, issued a notice to the State Bank of India asking why the unique alpha numeric number identifying individual electoral bonds were not handed over to the Election Commission of India for publication.

The court listed the case on March 18.

“Why did you not disclose the electoral bonds’ numbers?”, asked the five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice of India D. Y. Chandrachud on Friday.

The apex court said that it will scan and digitise the documents given by the ECI and return the originals to the poll body. The top court will do the scanning/digitising work by 5 p.m. on Saturday.

It will retain a digitised copy and also share the digitised version with the ECI in order to obviate the poll body from digitising the original again for publication in the official website.

Earlier on February 15, the five-judge Bench struck down the electoral bonds scheme, which provides blanket anonymity to political donors, as “unconstitutional”. It gave the bank 24 hours, that is, by the close of business hours on March 12, to provide the details of electoral bonds purchased anonymously and their encashment by political parties to the ECI.

On March 11, the Supreme Court dismissed a plea by the bank to extend the deadline till June 30, 2024, possibly well after the Lok Sabha polls, for providing the details. The court had said the information on electoral bonds was “readily available” with the bank.

Rejecting SBI’s argument that matching the bonds purchased and names of donors with the parties which redeemed the bonds was a “time-consuming and complex” exercise, the top court reiterated it needed a plain disclosure.