Who bought and sold electoral bonds to political parties? SBI refuses details under RTI

State Bank of India (SBI) has once again refused to divulge details, sought under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, of the Electoral Bond (EB) sale data of donors and recipient political parties, even though admitting that whatever little information it had was “goofed up” while handing it over to senior RTI activist, Venkatesh Nayak, during his earlier appeal.
Nayak, who is with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), has revealed in an email alert that he had sought, under RTI, information about the buyers of Electoral Bonds (EBs) and political parties, which received them. The Central Public Information Officer (CPIO) denied the information about buyers and the denominations of EBs they purchased, saying that compiling such information would lead to disproportionate diversion of the Bank's resources.
The CPIO also said that all reports sent to the Central government about the sale and purchase of EBs were in "fiduciary capacity" and could not be disclosed under Section 8(1)(e) of the RTI Act. Hence, the CPIO provided only denomination-wise figures for the sale of EBs through the designated branches.
Following an appeal before the SBI's First Appellate Authority (FAA) against CPIO’s rule, Nayak was told that the CPIO had goofed up while providing the EB sale data against his RTI application. FAA said, the CPIO’s sale data attributed to SBI’s Gandhinagar Branch actually belonged to the Bengaluru branch of SBI.
At the same time, FAA, says Nayak, FAA “refused to examine” the CPIO's reply in light of the RBI's Master Circular of July 2015 and an Supreme Court ruling of December 2015 on the nature of "fiduciary relationship", even as ignoring the Central Information Commission’s (CIC’s) 12-year-old ruling about the illegal practice of using Section 7(9) of the RTI Act for refusing information.
RBI's July 2015 Master Circular points to the exceptions under which the secrecy clause between the bank and the customer cannot be invoked. These include, where a “disclosure is under compulsion of law”, where “there is duty to the public to disclose”, where “interest of bank requires disclosure”, and where “the disclosure is made with the express or implied consent of the customer."
As for the Supreme Court, it rejected in its ruling RBI's claim that it stands in a "fiduciary" relationship with the banks that it regulate, hence would not disclose information under RTI. This ruling came in the context of information requests regarding non-performing assets (NPAs) and loan defaulters from public sector banks.
FAA also “upheld the CPIO's decision to reject information about buyers of EBs”, says Nayak, because, in his view, “such information is not available in compiled form and compiling it would disproportionately divert SBI's resources.”
Nayak notes, “My argument that Section 7(9) cannot be used to reject an RTI application but must be used to facilitate access to the requested information in any other form were simply ignored by the FAA. The FAA chose to mechanically uphold the CPIO's decision – an indication of a refusal to apply one's mind despite compelling case law.”
Comments Nayak, the replies by CPIO and FAA suggest the extent to which transparency in political party funding respected. He underlines, the EB scheme is “a backward leap to the era of secrecy”, something the new transparent system is proving it time and again.

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Ahmedabad's civic chaos: Drainage woes, waterlogging, and the illusion of Olympic dreams

In response to my blog on overflowing gutter lines at several spots in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur, a heavily populated area, a close acquaintance informed me that it's not just the middle-class housing societies that are affected by the nuisance. Preeti Das, who lives in a posh locality in what is fashionably called the SoBo area, tells me, "Things are worse in our society, Applewood."

RP Gupta a scapegoat to help Govt of India manage fallout of Adani case in US court?

RP Gupta, a retired 1987-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has found himself at the center of a growing controversy. During my tenure as the Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar (1997–2012), I often interacted with him. He struck me as a straightforward officer, though I never quite understood why he was never appointed to what are supposed to be top-tier departments like industries, energy and petrochemicals, finance, or revenue.

PharmEasy: The only online medical store which revises prices upwards after confirming the order

For senior citizens — especially those without a family support system — ordering medicines online can be a great relief. Shruti and I have been doing this for the last couple of years, and with considerable success. We upload a prescription, receive a verification call from a doctor, and within two or three days, the medicines are delivered to our doorstep.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

Environmental report raises alarm: Sabarmati one of four rivers with nonylphenol contamination

A new report by Toxics Link , an Indian environmental research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund , a global non-profit headquartered in New York, has raised the alarm that Sabarmati is one of five rivers across India found to contain unacceptable levels of nonylphenol (NP), a chemical linked to "exposure to carcinogenic outcomes, including prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women."

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.

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The other day, I received a message from a well-known activist, Raju Dipti, who runs an NGO called Jeevan Teerth in Koba village, near Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar. He was seeking the contact information of Atul Sawani, a translator of Russian books—mainly political and economic—into Gujarati for Progress Publishers during the Soviet era. He wanted to collect and hand over scanned soft copies, or if possible, hard copies, of Soviet books translated into Gujarati to Arvind Gupta, who currently lives in Pune and is undertaking the herculean task of collecting and making public soft copies of Soviet books that are no longer available in the market, both in English and Indian languages.

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Revisiting Gijubhai: Pioneer of child-centric education and the caste debate

It was Krishna Kumar, the well-known educationist, who I believe first introduced me to the name — Gijubhai Badheka (1885–1939). Hailing from Bhavnagar, known as the cultural capital of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Gijubhai, Kumar told me during my student days, made significant contributions to the field of pedagogy — something that hasn't received much attention from India's education mandarins. At that time, Kumar was my tutorial teacher at Kirorimal College, Delhi University.

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