India Inc makes big donations to political parties, but very little is made public on the amount or to whom it is given. Electoral Trusts revealing such data were expected to bring in more transparency.

A change in income-tax rules in January 2013 paved the way for the setting up of electoral trusts, but such funds still account for only a fraction of the thousands of crores being spent by parties on each election. So, have these trusts made a difference?

With about 1,866 registered parties, according to the Election Commission of India, hundreds of companies and business houses have been pouring in crores to back one party or another. While the setting up of electoral trusts by companies has definitely ushered in some transparency, there are still quite a few grey areas, says Anil Verma of the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), a non-profit election watchdog.

Also, not all such trusts have submitted their contribution reports. For instance, in 2014-15, only five of the 15 electoral trusts have so far disclosed the contributions received from corporates and the donations made to various political parties. They include Satya (the Bharti group registered a Satya Electoral Trust in 2013, but this one says it’s independent), Triumph (Murugappa Group), Samaj (KK Birla Group), Progressive (Tata Group) and Janpragati.

Money trail Delhi-based Satya Electoral Trust, which got contributions of ₹141.78 crore in 2014-15 from various companies (see table), gave the bulk of it (about ₹107 crore) to the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Mumbai-based Progressive Electoral Trust said it received over ₹25 crore and gave most of its donations to the Congress, the BJP, the Biju Janata Dal, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha and the Samajwadi Party.

Interestingly, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress, which rode to power in West Bengal opposing the Tata plant in Singur, got ₹1.15 crore from this trust during the Lok Sabha elections, while Tamil Nadu’s DMK got close to ₹1 crore from it.

Chennai-based Triumph, which declared contributions of over ₹3 crore, donated ₹2 crore to the BJP and ₹1 crore to the TDP in 2014-15. Interestingly, it also donated over ₹2 lakh to the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Kolkata-based Samaj, which received ₹52.5 lakh from three companies, donated ₹25 lakh each to two Kashmir-based parties: the Peoples Democratic Party and the National Conference.

Delhi-based Janpragati received ₹4.02 crore from companies such as Zensar Technologies, KEC International and CEAT Ltd, and donated the bulk of it to the Congress (₹3 crore), followed by the Shiv Sena (₹1 crore).

It’s still grey “While these five trusts have complied with the legal requirement of disbursing 95 per cent of their contributions to political parties, we still do not know who the contributors are to some other trusts that were set up earlier and continue to fund parties, as per our information,” said Laxmi Sriram, Senior Programme Associate, ADR, which is analysing the submissions. ADR said that for greater transparency, the EC should issue notices, take penal action or, at least, name and shame those who do not comply with the law.

Incidentally, in 2014-15, some other trusts among the 15 listed on the EC’s website, such as Janhit (Vedanta Group), Bajaj (Bajaj Group), Janata Nirvachak (Kotak Group), People’s Electoral Trust (Reliance Group), Paribartan (MP Birla Group) reported receiving no contributions and making no donations.

Another grey area, Sriram said, was that no registration address was available for older trusts (2003-04 to 2013-14), some of which continue to make political donations.

“When we asked the Income-Tax Department through two RTIs for the audit report and the registration addresses of these trusts in the larger public interest, they refused to provide the information, citing privacy concerns,” she said, adding that transparency so far is only limited to the contribution reports submitted by these Trusts to the Election Commission.

comment COMMENT NOW