State Bank of India (SBI) has issued Electoral Bonds worth Rs 16,518 crore in 30 tranches since the inception of the scheme in 2018, Parliament was informed on Monday. The objective of the Electoral Bond Scheme is to ensure that clean tax paid money comes into the system of political funding through proper banking channels, said Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary in a written reply in Lok Sabha.
“The total value of Electoral Bonds purchased (Phase-I to Phase-XXX) by State Bank of India is approximately Rs 16,518 crore. No GST or any other tax/cess is charged by the buyer on the purchase of Electoral Bonds,” he said .
Sharing details, Chaudhary said, the commission paid to SBI by the Government of India for issue and redemption of Electoral Bonds from Phase I to Phase XXV is around 8.57 crore rupees while the amount paid by the government to Security Printing & Minting Corporation of India Ltd. (SPMCIL) so far is around 1.90 crore.
Regarding Rs 5,000 crore ‘SEBI-Sahara Refund Account’, he said that an online portal was launched on July 18, 2023, for submission of claims for refund of the genuine depositors of four Multi-State Cooperative Societies of Sahara Group, namely Sahara. Credit Cooperative Society Ltd, Lucknow; Saharayn Universal Multipurpose Society Ltd, Bhopal; Humara India Credit Cooperative Society Ltd, Kolkata; and Stars Multipurpose Cooperative Society Ltd, Hyderabad.
The entire process of disbursement is being carried out under the supervision and vigilance of Justice R. Subhash Reddy, Former Judge of the Supreme Court, he said in a separate reply.
At present, he said, a payment of only up to Rs 10,000 is disbursed to each genuine depositor of the Sahara Group of Cooperative Societies against verified claims through an Aadhaar-based bank account.
A total of around 1.21 crores have been registered on the “CRCS-Sahara Refund Portal” and an amount of 258.47 crores has been released to 2,77,607 depositors of Sahara Group of Cooperative Societies till 31st January 2024.
During 2023-24 (up to January 2024), the RBI injected liquidity into the banking system by conducting eight fine-tuning variable rate repo (VRR) operations amounting to Rs 8 lakh crore and three VRR prime operations amounting to Rs 4.7 lakh crore. crore.
This contributed, among others, to a year-on-year increase in non-food credit by 18.6 percent in April-November 2023.