RTI and Electoral Bonds: What the Supreme Court Judgment Means for Disclosure

For years, the Electoral Bonds Scheme was defended by the government as a clean, transparent alternative to cash donations — a way to bring political funding into the formal financial system while shielding donor identities from partisan retaliation. Critics countered that what was called confidentiality was in practice anonymity, and anonymity in political funding is not a feature but a defect of democracy. In February 2024, the Supreme Court of India settled the question: the Electoral Bonds Scheme was unconstitutional, and the right of voters to know who funds political parties is a fundamental right under the Constitution.

That judgment did not end the story. It opened a new chapter — one about disclosure, access to records, and what ordinary citizens can now obtain through the Right to Information Act, 2005 from public authorities that had roles in the scheme. This post explains what the Electoral Bonds Scheme was, what the Supreme Court held, and what RTI can and cannot get you in the aftermath.

What the Electoral Bonds Scheme Was

The Electoral Bonds Scheme was introduced through the Finance Act, 2017. Rather than creating a standalone law, the scheme was inserted into the legal framework by amending four existing statutes simultaneously: the Representation of the People Act, 1951 (which governs elections), the Companies Act, 2013 (which governs corporate political donations), the Income Tax Act, 1961 (which governs disclosure and taxation), and the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 (which governs foreign-origin donations). These amendments, bundled into a Finance Act and passed as a Money Bill, gave the scheme its legal foundation — and that method of passage was itself one of the grounds of constitutional challenge.

Under the scheme, a person or entity wishing to donate to a political party could walk into a notified State Bank of India branch during one of the sale windows authorised by the government, purchase electoral bonds in fixed denominations (from ₹1,000 to ₹1 crore), and hand those bonds to any registered political party with a valid bank account. The political party would then deposit the bond for redemption within fifteen days. The entire transaction was processed through the banking system, which meant there was a paper trail — but it was a paper trail that the public could not see.

The critical design feature was anonymity at the public level. The donor's name did not appear on the bond. The political party receiving the bond was not required to disclose which entity had donated. The party's contribution report filed with the Election Commission of India showed receipts from electoral bonds as a lump sum, without identifying who had purchased them. The only party that held complete matching information — which purchaser's bond had been redeemed by which political party — was the State Bank of India, through its internal transaction records.

SBI is a nationalised public sector bank, a public authority under Section 2(h) of the RTI Act. But under the scheme, that information was not being voluntarily disclosed. Citizens and civil society organisations that filed RTI applications with SBI seeking details of electoral bond purchases received responses citing various exemptions or claiming the information was not available in a shareable form.

The Supreme Court Judgment: Association for Democratic Reforms & Anr. v. Union of India (2024)

The challenge to the Electoral Bonds Scheme reached the Supreme Court of India, where a five-judge Constitution Bench heard the consolidated petitions. The lead case in the style of the proceedings was Association for Democratic Reforms & Anr. v. Union of India. The Constitution Bench delivered a unanimous judgment in February 2024 — five judges, five separate or concurring opinions converging on the same result.

The Court struck down the Electoral Bonds Scheme as unconstitutional.

The core of the constitutional reasoning was the right to information under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. Article 19(1)(a) guarantees freedom of speech and expression, and the Court affirmed — following a line of decisions including the privacy and electoral disclosure cases — that this right includes the right to receive information, including information about the funding of political parties that seek to form the government. The Court held that voters cannot meaningfully exercise their fundamental right to vote if they are denied information about who finances the candidates and parties they are choosing between.

Political funding, in the Court's analysis, is not a private matter between a donor and a party. The identity and scale of a donor's contributions is information that bears directly on the risk of quid pro quo arrangements between funders and future policy — the classic concern of campaign finance law worldwide. By constructing a scheme in which that information was systematically withheld from the public, the Electoral Bonds Scheme violated voters' fundamental right to know.

The Court also rejected the government's argument that donor anonymity was necessary to protect donors from political retaliation. The Constitution Bench drew a distinction between donations by private individuals of modest means — where the concern about retaliation might have some force — and donations by large corporations. For corporate donors, the Court held, the proportionality analysis does not support total anonymity: the scale and potential influence of large corporate political donations place them in a different category, and the public's interest in knowing who is funding which party at scale outweighs the donor's claimed interest in confidentiality from public scrutiny.

Having struck down the scheme, the Court gave consequential directions. It directed the State Bank of India to provide complete electoral bond transaction data — purchaser names, bond amounts, alphanumeric bond numbers, and which political party redeemed each bond — to the Election Commission of India. It directed ECI to publish that data on its website. Both SBI and ECI were given specific timelines for compliance.

This was not a direction to enact a new law or to build a new system. It was a direction to produce and publish records that already existed.

What the ECI Published

The Election Commission of India, following the Supreme Court's directions, published the electoral bond data on its website. The published dataset covered the full period of the scheme's operation. It included purchaser names and the amounts of bonds purchased, as well as the party-wise records of bonds redeemed.

Matching the two sides of the dataset — which purchaser bought bonds when, and which party redeemed bonds when, using the alphanumeric bond serial numbers — allowed journalists, researchers, and civil society organisations to reconstruct the donor-to-party relationships that the scheme had been designed to conceal. That matching exercise was performed publicly, reported extensively, and the resulting information is now part of the public record.

This published data is the primary accessible source of electoral bond information. It exists because the Supreme Court ordered it to be produced and published — not because the RTI Act alone compelled it. But the fact that it is now published by a public authority (ECI) means it is also available through RTI as a held record, if you need a certified copy or a specific subset.

What RTI Can Now Get You

RTI with the Election Commission of India

The ECI is a constitutional body established under Article 324 of the Constitution. It is unambiguously a public authority under Section 2(h) of the RTI Act. The ECI's RTI portal is at eci.gov.in/rti-online-portal. Citizens can file applications online through that portal; the ₹10 fee applies in the ordinary way. For BPL cardholders, the fee is waived on production of the BPL card number with the application.

Since the Supreme Court order, the following categories of information held by ECI are accessible through RTI:

The electoral bond dataset itself. The data was published on the ECI website, but if you need a formal certified copy of the records as submitted by SBI to ECI, or the party-wise redemption data as separately maintained by ECI, those are documents held by ECI and accessible under RTI. If the website link is not functional or you need a specific format, an RTI application will work.

Party-wise electoral bond receipts as declared to ECI. Registered political parties are required to submit their accounts and contribution reports to the ECI. The contribution report system (Form 24A, for donations above ₹20,000) was effectively bypassed by the electoral bonds scheme for bonds — because the scheme's statutory amendments removed the requirement to identify donors in the Form 24A for bond receipts. But the total amounts received through bonds, as declared by parties in their overall accounts filed with ECI, are held by ECI and accessible through RTI.

Compliance correspondence between ECI and the Finance Ministry. If ECI received communications from the Finance Ministry or from SBI about the implementation of the Supreme Court's disclosure order, those are held records and RTI-accessible. This is useful for researchers tracking how the disclosure process was managed — what was submitted on which date, whether extensions were sought, and what the ECI's internal correspondence on publication looked like.

Form 24A contribution reports for all parties, all years. This is a category that has been used by transparency organisations for years and predates the electoral bonds litigation. Political parties are required to file Form 24A with the ECI for every donation above ₹20,000, identifying the donor, address, and amount. These forms are held by the ECI and have been released pursuant to RTI applications by organisations like the Association for Democratic Reforms. While the electoral bonds mechanism was specifically structured to evade Form 24A reporting requirements for bond donations, the Form 24A records for non-bond donations are an important parallel resource. Filing RTI with ECI for the Form 24A filings of any registered political party for any financial year is an established and productive route to political donation data.

RTI with the State Bank of India

SBI is a nationalised bank established under the State Bank of India Act, 1955, and the Banking Companies (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertakings) Act, 1970. It is a public sector undertaking and a public authority under Section 2(h) of the RTI Act. SBI's Central Public Information Officer is at its corporate office in Mumbai; second appeals from SBI RTI decisions go to the Central Information Commission (CIC), not a state information commission, because SBI is a body of the Union Government.

Following the Supreme Court's order, SBI submitted the electoral bond data to ECI. That submission has been made; it is not a pending action. But SBI itself holds (or held) operational records about the scheme that are RTI-accessible in principle:

Aggregate statistics on electoral bonds issued and redeemed. How many bonds were issued across all sale windows? What was the total face value issued? What proportion was redeemed versus lapsed (unredeemed bonds after fifteen days were to be deposited into the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund)? These aggregate figures are less sensitive than individual transaction data and are the kind of summary information that RTI is well-suited to produce.

SBI's operational guidelines for the Electoral Bonds Scheme. The scheme was implemented by SBI through internal circulars, customer-facing procedures, and branch-level instructions. These operational documents — how branches were told to verify purchaser identity (KYC), how bond issuance was logged, what records were retained at branch versus central level — are administrative documents held by SBI. They are RTI-accessible unless SBI claims a specific exemption. Understanding how the scheme actually worked at the operational level may be relevant for researchers or legal proceedings.

The data submitted to ECI. The specific transaction-level data — individual purchaser names matched to redemptions — was submitted by SBI to ECI and is now published through the ECI. Whether SBI retains a copy and whether that copy is accessible via RTI to SBI are separate questions; the primary source for the matched data is now the ECI publication, not a fresh RTI to SBI.

It is worth noting: for any individual donor-specific or party-specific bond transaction details, the published ECI dataset is the right starting point. Filing RTI with SBI for the same information that is already publicly available from ECI is unlikely to produce additional information and may be declined on the basis that the records are now held primarily by ECI (which holds them pursuant to the Supreme Court order). Use RTI with SBI for the operational and aggregate questions; use the published ECI data (and RTI with ECI for certified copies if needed) for transaction-specific questions.

RTI with the Finance Ministry

The Electoral Bonds Scheme was notified by the Ministry of Finance, Department of Economic Affairs. The scheme's legal amendments were sponsored by the Finance Ministry through the Finance Act, 2017. The DEA holds the original policy files for the scheme.

This is a category where the RTI Act's Section 8 exemptions need to be considered carefully — but also where the Supreme Court judgment now shifts the analysis:

The Cabinet note and inter-ministerial consultation files. The scheme was introduced after Cabinet approval. The Cabinet note proposing the scheme, the comments received from other ministries (including the Law Ministry and the Election Commission), and the inter-ministerial discussions are now historical records. Section 8(1)(i) of the RTI Act exempts Cabinet papers including records of deliberations of the Council of Ministers, Secretaries and other officers — but with a critical proviso: "provided that the decisions of Council of Ministers, the reasons thereof, and the material on the basis of which the decisions were taken shall be made public after the decision has been taken, and the matter is complete and over." The scheme has now been struck down. The matter is complete. The proviso to Section 8(1)(i) means that the reasons for the decision and the material on the basis of which it was taken should now be disclosable.

Legal opinions obtained by the Finance Ministry. The Ministry may have obtained legal advice on the constitutional validity of the scheme before introducing it. Legal opinions in the hands of government are sometimes claimed to be exempt under Section 8(1)(e) (fiduciary relationship) — but the Supreme Court has been clear that Section 8(1)(e) does not give a blanket exemption for legal advice obtained by government in its own interest. The correct exemption, if any, would need to be applied to the specific documents. A well-framed RTI asking for the legal advice obtained by the Ministry of Finance, Department of Economic Affairs, regarding the constitutional validity of the Electoral Bonds Scheme before its introduction is a legitimate request worth pursuing.

The scheme's notification and gazette records. The formal gazette notification of the Electoral Bonds Scheme and its subsequent amendments are public documents already available on the National Archives and the Ministry website. RTI is not needed for these, but they can be formally obtained through RTI if you need certified copies.

What RTI Cannot Get You

There are important limits to RTI's reach in this area.

Direct RTI to political parties will not work for electoral bond data. As discussed in depth in the companion piece on RTI and political parties, the legal status of political parties under Section 2(h) of the RTI Act is unresolved. The Central Information Commission held in 2013 that major national parties are public authorities; the parties challenged that order; the Delhi High Court granted a stay; the matter remains unresolved in the courts. In the meantime, filing RTI with a political party asking which corporations donated to it via electoral bonds will not produce a response — not because the data doesn't exist, but because parties are not currently processing RTI applications. The route to that information is through ECI, not through the party itself.

Individual bank account details of party recipients. SBI's records of electoral bond redemptions include the party's bank account details. These are banking records that fall within the ordinary financial privacy of bank accounts. The RTI-accessible information is at the level of which party received which bonds — which is what the ECI-published dataset shows — not the full banking records of the parties themselves.

Corporate donor records held by private companies. An electoral bond purchaser's internal records about its decision to purchase bonds — board resolutions, internal correspondence, the quid pro quo concerns that activists have raised — are in the hands of private companies, not public authorities. RTI does not reach private sector entities. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) holds annual filing data for companies, including their stated political contributions under Companies Act requirements, which is a separate (and RTI-accessible) source of information about corporate political donations.

The Bigger Picture: RTI, Electoral Bonds, and Political Accountability

The Electoral Bonds Scheme and its undoing is a case study in how different accountability mechanisms work together — and how they can be used systematically to build political finance transparency even when any single tool is incomplete.

The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and Election Watch have spent more than two decades using RTI applications, public interest litigation, and analysis of ECI-published data to track political funding in India. Their methodology is instructive: RTI with ECI for Form 24A contribution reports, obtained party by party and year by year; analysis of candidate affidavits for wealth declarations; examination of corporate political donation disclosures under the Companies Act; and sustained litigation that eventually produced the Supreme Court's 2024 judgment. The electoral bond data that is now publicly available exists in large part because ADR was one of the petitioners before the Constitution Bench.

This is the model for how RTI works best on politically sensitive subjects — not as a single silver-bullet application, but as one instrument in a sustained strategy that combines RTI filings, analysis of compulsorily disclosed documents, litigation, and public reporting.

For citizens who want to engage with this area, the practical starting points are:

The ECI-published electoral bond dataset, which is the most complete source of information about which entities purchased bonds and which parties received them during the scheme's operation.

RTI applications to ECI for party-wise Form 24A contribution reports, which give the broader picture of reported political donations beyond electoral bonds.

RTI applications to the Finance Ministry under the Section 8(1)(i) proviso, seeking the policy file and inter-ministerial consultations for the scheme's introduction, on the basis that the matter is now concluded.

RTI applications to SBI for aggregate statistical information about the scheme's operation and for its operational guidelines.

None of this replaces the kind of sustained institutional engagement that ADR has done — but it gives any interested citizen the legal tools to begin their own inquiry into a corner of Indian democracy that was deliberately kept in shadow for seven years.

If you want to file RTI applications with the Election Commission of India, the State Bank of India, or the Ministry of Finance on electoral bonds or political funding — RTISathi.com has guides on filing with each of these authorities, including sample RTI application formats and step-by-step instructions for using the online portal. The right to know who funds Indian politics is now constitutionally affirmed. RTI is one of the tools through which that right can be exercised.