SBI offers 30 tranches of electoral bonds totaling Rs 16,518 crore

SBI offers 30 tranches of electoral bonds totaling Rs 16,518 crore

"The total value of the electoral bonds (Phase I to Phase XXX) that we bought from State Bank of India is roughly Rs 16,518 crore," the minister said. Election bond buyers are not subject to GST or any other taxes or fees, according to State Minister of Finance Pankaj Chaudhary.

In a written response to the Lok Sabha, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said that the goal of the electoral bond program is to guarantee that funds paid for by taxes are entering the political financing system via the appropriate banking channels.

Since the program's inception in 2018, State Bank of India (SBI) has issued electoral bonds totaling Rs 16,518 crore in 30 installments, the Parliament was told on Monday.

In a written response to the Lok Sabha, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said that the goal of the electoral bond program is to guarantee that funds paid for by taxes are entering the political financing system via the appropriate banking channels.

"The total value of the electoral bonds (Phase I to Phase XXX) that we bought from the State Bank of India is roughly Rs 16,518 crore," he said. Said that while purchasing electoral bonds, the buyer is not assessed GST or any other taxes or fees.

Giving specifics, Chaudhary revealed that the government of India paid around Rs 8.57 crore to SBI for issuing and cashing electoral bonds from Phase I to Phase XXV, and that the government also paid roughly the same amount to Security Printing and Minting Corporation of India Ltd. There is still an outstanding balance of Rs 1.90 crore regarding the payment paid to SPMCIL.

He stated that an online site was created on July 18, 2023, for the purpose of submitting refund claims by legitimate depositors of four multi-state co-operative societies of the Sahara Group, with respect to the Rs 5,000 crore 'SEBI-Sahara Refund Account'. Saharan Universal Multipurpose Society Incorporated in Bhopal; Our India Credit Cooperative Society Limited in Kolkata; Stars Multipurpose Cooperative Society Incorporated in Hyderabad; Credit Cooperative Society Limited in Lucknow.

In a second response, he said that retired Supreme Court judge Justice R. Subhash Reddy is overseeing and supervising the whole payment process.

Only Rs 10,000 is now given, according to him, to each legitimate depositor of the cooperative societies owned by the Sahara Group, in response to claims that have been validated using a bank account linked to Aadhaar.

The 'CRCS-Sahara Refund Portal' has received about 1.21 crore applications. Up to January 31, 2024, 2,77,607 depositors of the Sahara Group of Co-operative Societies would get a payment of Rs 258.47 crore.

Through the execution of eight fine-tuning variable rate repo (VRR) operations worth Rs 8 lakh crore and three VRR main operations totaling Rs 4.7 lakh crore, the RBI injected liquidity into the banking sector during 2023–2024 (till January 2024). Ten thousand.

This is one of the factors that has led to the 18.6% annual rise in non-food credit from April to November of 2023.