This report analyses the party-wise share of Electoral Bonds of National Political Parties since the inception of the Electoral Bonds Scheme in 2018. It tries to compare three different data sets available in the public domain through the website of the Election Commission of India (ECI). During the continuous three-day Supreme Court hearing in the matter of Electoral Bonds in October 2023, the court reiterated its 2019 order and directed the ECI to give the details of Electoral Bond donations received by parties till September 2023. On March 11, 2024, the Supreme Court of India directed ECI to publish the details of sealed covers on their website. Further, in compliance with the Supreme Court’s directions contained in its order dated February 15 & March 11 2024, State Bank of India provided the details of Electoral Bonds from 12 April 2019 to 15 February 2024. In view of the above, electoral bonds data is now available as per the SBI disclosures (12 April 2019 to 15 February 2024), ECI’s disclosure based on sealed covers data submitted by political parties (March 2018 to September 2023) and the audit reports of parties available from FY 2017-18 to 2022-23. Please Note: Since, the disclosures made by SBI cover the time period from 12 April 2019 to 15 February 2024 only (and does not include details of Electoral Bonds from March 2018 to April 11, 2019) and the audit reports of political parties for FY 2023-24 are not available yet, it is difficult to analyse and compare this data completely. ADR has compiled the following tables based on the preliminary analysis of the data available in the public domain now and the variation in reporting of details of Electoral Bonds by parties in sealed covers to ECI.
