Electoral Bonds and the Curious Case of SBI Keeping Crucial Data in Physical Form

On the afternoon of March 4, 2024, the State Bank of India (SBI) submitted an application in the Supreme Court asking for the court to” Grant time to the Applicant Bank till 30.06.2024 to adhere to the instructions in its Judgement dated 15.02.2024 in W.P. (C) No. 880 of 2017 and batch.” This is the judgment in which the Supreme Court directed the SBI to “send the information of political celebrations which have actually gotten contributions through Electoral Bonds … to the ECI.” It stated that the SBI needs to reveal information of each electoral bond encashed by political celebrations and consist of the date of encashment and the denomination of the electoral bond. The peak court stated that the SBI is to send this details to the ECI within 3 weeks from the date of this judgment, that is, by March 6, 2024. The application makes some shocking disclosures, perhaps unintentionally. The primary one is that a few of the information was not kept digitally. Let the application promote itself: “10. It is sent that donor information were kept in a sealed cover at the designated branches and all such sealed covers were transferred in the Main Branch of the Applicant bank, which lies in Mumbai. “11. On the other end, each political celebration was needed to preserve a designated account in any of the 29 authorised Branches. It was just in this account that electoral bonds gotten by that celebration might be transferred and redeemed. At the time of redemption, the initial bond, the pay-in slip would be kept in a sealed cover and sent out to the SBI Mumbai Main Branch. … “13. It is sent that the retrieval of info from each silo and the treatment of matching the info of one silo to that of the other would be a time consuming workout. The information are saved independently, a few of the information such as variety of Bonds, and so on are saved digitally while the other set of information such as name of buyer, KYC and so on, are saved physically. The function of not saving all information digitally was to guarantee that it can not be collected quickly to accomplish the item of the plan” The italics were included. The very first thing that surprises is the storage of information in “physical” type, in this day and age. It is undoubtedly incredible that the SBI anticipates anybody, least of all the Supreme Court, which has actually been working extremely vigilantly to digitalise its own working, to think that the biggest bank of a nation, which is the world leader in UPI (Unified Payments Interface), is keeping such important information in physical type. The 2nd is what the application, and in specific paragraph
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