What does Electoral Bond data published by the ECI tell us?

The electoral bonds data was published by the Election Commission of India on its official website on March 14, as ordered by the Supreme Court.

In the electoral bonds data released yesterday, the only identifier on the donor side is the name of the company or individual. In order to find out more about donor companies, we did an exact name match with the database of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), fetched their unique ID, and looked into basic data available from MCA on them. These are some of the findings.

Who are the biggest donors?

The Election Commission of India office in New Delhi. (Reuters File Photo)

In the data released, there are 1,260 companies and individuals that purchased electoral bonds worth ₹12,769 crore. The top 20, all companies, accounted for ₹5,945 crore—or nearly half of the total amount donated through electoral bonds.

Ms SN Mohanty is the biggest individual donor in the list with total donations of ₹45 crore. She is followed by Lakshmi Niwas Mitttal who donated ₹35 crore. Here is the list of top ten individual donors.

Newly incorporated companies

For about 500 companies, we were able to get an exact name match with the MCA database. Of these, there were 28 companies that were set up on or after April 12, 2019, when the first electoral bond was purchased. These are the top 10 purchasers of electoral bonds among them.

Bonds purchased versus net profits

Of the top 20 purchasers of electoral bonds, we were able to get financials for 13 companies. This is what their bond purchases look like in proportion to their net profits.