Vedanta donates Rs 155 crore to political parties in FY23

PTI, Jun 25, 2023, 12:54 PM IST

Billionaire Anil Agarwal’s mining conglomerate Vedanta Ltd donated Rs 155 crore to political parties through electoral bonds in the fiscal ended March 2023, according to the company’s latest annual report.

The donation was higher than Rs 123 crore the firm gave in 2021-22 (April 2021 to March 2022), the annual report for 2022-23 said.

It did not give the names of the beneficiary political parties.

The Modi government had, in 2017-18, introduced the system of electoral bonds for electoral funding. This was to provide an alternative to the cash donations. Anyone could buy electoral bonds from the State Bank of India (SBI) and donate them to any political party. Political parties then encash them.

The scheme does not require political parties to mention the names and addresses of those contributing by way of electoral bonds in their contribution reports filed with the Election Commission of India annually.

In the last five years, Vedanta has donated a cumulative Rs 457 crore to political parties via electoral bonds.

In the annual report, Vedanta said it made donations of Rs 160 crore in the 2022-23 fiscal. These “include contributions through electoral bonds of Rs 155 crore”.

In the previous financial year, the donations totalled Rs 130 crore, including Rs 123 crore contribution through electoral bonds.

The donations to political parties were more than Vedanta’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending of Rs 112 crore in 2022-23 and Rs 37 crore in the previous year, the report showed.

Vedanta’s Janhit Electoral Trust is one of the over dozen electoral trusts floated by corporates for making donations to political parties. Other corporates that own electoral trusts include Progressive Electoral Trust of Tatas, People’s Electoral Trust of Reliance group, Satya Electoral Trust of Bharti Group, MP Birla Group’s Paribartan Electoral Trust and KK Birla Group’s Samaj Electoral Trust Association. Bajaj and Mahindra also have electoral trusts.

In the annual report, Vedanta identified Janhit Electoral Trust as one of the entities “over which key management personnel/their relatives have control or significant influence”. It did not give details.

According to Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), a total of 22,641 Electoral Bonds worth Rs 12,979 crore were sold in 26 phases between March 2018 to April 2023. As many as 22,458 bonds worth Rs 12,955 crore were redeemed during this period. Almost 28 per cent of the total value of electoral bonds were purchased in two months alone – March and April 2019 – the period of general elections.

The ruling BJP received most donations made through electoral bonds, according to ADR.