'Decoding Electoral Bonds, a complex process': SBI seeks more time from Supreme Court to furnish details

New Delhi: Days after Supreme Court directed State Bank of India (SBI) to furnish all the information on Electoral Bonds to the Election Commission by March 6, 2024, the latter has has approached the top court seeking extension of the deadline till June 30, 2024.

The Apex court, in its February 15, 2024 judgement, had declared the opaque scheme for donation to political parties as "unconstitutional". It had also directed SBI to furnish all the information on bonds to the Election Commission by March 6, 2024 to be put on website of the poll panel.

The bank, which sold the Electoral Bonds, however, cited certain practical difficulties with the decoding exercise and the timeline fixed for it by the top court.

In an application, it said between April 12, 2019, to the date of the judgement i.e. February 15, 2024, 22,217 electoral bonds were used for making donations to various political parties. 

Redeemed Bonds were deposited to Mumbai Main Branch by the authorised branches at the end of each phase in sealed envelopes.

Coupled with the fact that two different information silos existed, this would mean that a total of 44,434 information sets would have to be decoded, compiled and compared, it said.

"Therefore, the timeline of three weeks fixed by the court in its judgement would not be sufficient for the entire exercise to be completed," it said, seeking extension of time.

The bank also said due to the stringent measures undertaken to ensure that the identity of the donors was kept anonymous, “decoding” of the Electoral bonds and the matching of the donor to the donations made would be a complex process.

After the scheme was launched on January 2, 2018, the SBI, in order to protect the donors anonymity and to maintain confidentiality/secrecy, it has laid down a detailed Standard Operating Procedure for 29 authorised branches, spread all over India, with regard to sale and redemption of Electoral Bonds, it said. 

It said details of purchases made at the branches are not maintained centrally at any one place, such as the name of purchaser/donor which could be tallied with date of issue, place of issue (Branch), denomination of bond, and its number.

"The data related to the issuance of the bond and the data related to the redemption of the bond was kept recorded in two different silos. No central database was maintained. This was done so as to ensure that donors’ anonymity would be protected," it said.

The donor details were kept in a sealed cover at the designated branches and all such sealed covers were deposited in the Main Branch of the applicant bank, which is located in Mumbai, it said.

Each political party, on the other hand, was required to maintain a designated account in any of the 29 authorised Branches. 

"It was only in this account that electoral bonds received by that party could be deposited and redeemed. At the time of redemption, the original bond, the pay-in slip would be stored in a sealed cover and sent to the SBI Mumbai Main Branch. It can thus be noted that both sets of information’s were being stored independently of each other. Thus, to re-match them would be a task requiring significant amount of effort.

"In order to make available donor information, the date of issue of each bond will have to be checked, and matched against the date of purchase by a particular donor. This exercise would only deal with the first silo of information. These Bonds were redeemed by the Political Parties in their designated Bank accounts. Accordingly this information would then have to be matched against the bond redemption information that makes up the second silo," it said.

The bank further said retrieval of information from each silo and the procedure of matching the information of one silo to that of the other would be a time consuming exercise. 

The details are stored separately, some of the details such as number of Bonds, etc are stored digitally while the other set of details such as name of purchaser, KYC etc, are stored physically. The purpose of not storing all details digitally was to ensure that it cannot be gathered easily to achieve the object of the scheme, it said.