The Union government printed 10,000 electoral bonds worth Rs 1 crore each sometime between August 1 and October 29, according to two Right to Information replies from State Bank of India (SBI) on those dates.
The most recent tranche of electoral bonds went on sale from October 1 to October 10, in the run-up to the Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat elections.
The last time the government printed electoral bonds was in 2019, when bonds worth Rs 11,400 crore in different denominations were printed at the India Security Press in Nashik, according to the October 29 reply by SBI to RTI activist Kanhaiya Kumar.
SBI, the only bank authorised by the government to sell electoral bonds, said in the same reply that 10,000 electoral bonds worth Rs 1 crore were printed in the calendar year 2022. In reply to Kumar’s earlier RTI query with the same question, SBI had on August 1 provided details of the printing of electoral bonds in 2018 and 2019 as the only instances of the same.
