New Delhi: The State Bank of India has moved the Supreme Court seeking an extension of time till June 30, 2024, to furnish information regarding electoral bonds to the Election Commission of India (ECI).
The apex court, in a judgment delivered by a constitution bench on February 15, had directed the SBI is required to furnish the information to ECI by March 6. The apex court had struck down the electoral bond scheme as unconstitutional.
''It is submitted that 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,'' said SBI.
“The timeline of three weeks fixed by the court in its judgment dated 15.02.2024 would not be sufficient for the entire exercise to be completed. Therefore, an extension of time may kindly be granted by this Hon’ble Court in order to enable the SBI to comply with the Judgment”, said the application filed by SBI.
The application further submitted that this court has directed for making public, donor information from the date of its interim order of April 12, 2019, to the date of the judgment, February 15. “In that time period, twenty-two thousand two hundred seventeen (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 forty-four thousand four hundred thirty-four (44,434) information sets would have to be decoded, compiled and compared”, said the application.
The bank said that the 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. It said that 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 added.
The SBI said that in order to protect the donors anonymity and to maintain confidentiality/secrecy, it has laid down a detailed standard operating procedure (SOP) for 29 authorised branches, spread all over India, with regard to sale and redemption of electoral bonds.
The SBI submitted that 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, bond number.
“It is submitted that 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 to ensure that donors’ anonymity would be protected. It is submitted that 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”, said the application.
The bank said each political party was required to maintain a designated account in any of the 29 authorised branches and 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 added.
The SBI said that it can thus be noted that both sets of information were being stored independently of each other and thus, to re-match them would be a task requiring a 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”, said the SBI’s application.
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