Political parties report sharp decline in donations

National parties reported a steep decline in donations received during 2015-16, says a report compiled by National Election Watch and the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) on the basis of returns submitted by them to the Election Commission of India.

The BJP, says the report released on Tuesday afternoon, reported a decline from ₹437 crore in the previous year to ₹76 crore in 2015-16. Yet the donations received by the ruling party are three times higher than the combined donations of INC, NCP, CPI, CPM and AITC, which together claimed to have received ₹25 crore, the lion’s share of ₹20 crore reported by the Indian National Congress.

The following are the salient features of the report released by ADR:

• 75% of the donations made to All India parties came from just three states, namely Delhi, Maharashtra and Karnataka.
• BJP has claimed to have received donations from only 330 individuals.
• Corporate donations to the BJP amounted to ₹67.99 crores and to the INC ₹8.86 crores
• As in past years the Bahujan Samaj Party submitted a Nil Return signifying that it has not received a single donation above ₹20,000.
• All India Trinamul Congress filed a return of having received only 13 donations worth ₹65 lakhs
• All the parties taken together reported cash donations of only ₹1.43 crores. Congress alone reported cash donations of ₹1.17 crores.
• BJP reported to have received ₹50,000 cash donations and all from Bihar.
• Cash donations largely were made to the parties in Karnataka (₹80 lakhs) and Meghalaya (₹21.55 lakhs)

EVASIVE RETURNS BY ALL NATIONAL PARTIES

The ADR report castigates all national parties for submitting evasive returns, not providing mandatory details like cheque numbers, PAN numbers of donors and leaving the form blank in several places. Tax exemptions should be withdrawn from defaulting parties, ADR suggested.The report among other things said:

• ₹8.11 crores was declared as received by INC during FY 2015-16 from 318 such donors whose PAN details were unavailable. 49%of such funds came from individuals who donated ₹3.99 crores and 51% from corporate donors who donated ₹4.12 crores.
• ₹83.915 lakhs was declared as received by BJP during FY 2014-15 from 20 such donors whose PAN details, Address and Mode of contribution (together) were unavailable. Thus, only names of such donors and the contributed amount was declared by the party. 73% of such funds came from corporates and 27% from individual donors.
• BJP collected ₹2.19 crores from 71 donations without declaring PAN details in its report submitted for FY 2015-16.
• In the report submitted by CPM for FY 2015-16, the column for declaring mode of contribution is missing from the report, for 61 donations amounting to Rs 1.81 crores. This forms 100% of total donations above ₹20,000 to the party. Without the cheque/DD details, it would be a time consuming process to link the donors against their donations and hence trace the money trail.