Rs 150.51 crore electoral bond sales in July first week

Electoral bonds worth Rs 150.51 crore were sold and the whole was redeemed by political parties during the latest round of bond sales in early July, according to an RTI response.

In the previous phase in April, bonds worth Rs 695.34 crore were sold and only two bonds worth Rs 1,000 each were not redeemed.

According to the RTI response provided by the SBI to transparency activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired) on Tuesday, the highest sale was in the Kolkata branch of the SBI where bonds worth Rs 97.31 crore were sold between July 1 and 10.

Chennai branch came second with Rs 30 crore sale followed by Hyderabad where the bond sale was Rs 10 crore. There were sales of bonds in Chandigarh, Mumbai, Delhi and Panaji branches also.

When it comes to redeeming the bonds, the Kolkata branch topped the list with Rs 107.56 crore while the New Delhi branch had bonds worth Rs 42.95 crore redeemed. No parties approached any other branches for redeeming bonds bought during this period.

Since 2018 when the electoral bond came into being, there were 17 phases of sales during which bonds worth Rs 7,380.63 crore have been sold while Rs 7,360.35 crore were encashed. The bonds which were not encashed amounting to around Rs 20.28 crore were transferred to the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund.

Incidentally, DH reported, the Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Choudhary had on July 20 said in a written reply in Rajya Sabha that the government wanted more time to collect furnish details of the sale of electoral bonds though by then the transparency activists had accessed information through the Right to Information (RTI) route.

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