In its Feb 15 directive, a five-judge bench of CJI D Y Chandrachud and Justices Sanjiv Khanna, B R Gavai, J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misrahad had said, “SBI shall submit details of Electoral Bonds purchased since the interim order of this court dated 12 April 2019 till date to ECI. The details shall include the date of purchase of each Electoral Bond, the name of the purchaser of the bond and the denomination of Electoral Bond purchased…ECI shall publish the information shared by SBI on its official website within one week of the receipt of the information, that is, by March 13, 2024.”
Explaining the enormity of the task, SBI said between April 12, 2019, and Feb 15 this year, 22,217 EBs were used for making donations to various political parties.

“Redeemed EBs 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.
SBI 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.”

It said as many as 29 branches of SBI across India were authorised for sale and redemption of EBs.
“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 said.

“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 in Mumbai,” SBI said, adding that each political party was required to maintain a designated account in any of the 29 authorised branches where EB amounts were deposited.

“Both sets of information were being stored independently of each other. To re-match them would be a task requiring a significant amount of effort. 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,” SBI explained.
It said that the purpose of not storing all details digitally was to ensure that it cannot be gathered easily to achieve the anonymity object of the scheme.