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Desi Engine
Desi Engine
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New Delhi

Corporate and business organizations donated Rs 921.95 crore to national political parties in the financial year 2019-20. In this, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got the maximum donation. According to a report by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), the BJP received a total corporate donation of Rs 720.407 crore in this fiscal. In this report, ADR analyzed the donations to five parties.

According to an analysis by ADR, an NGO working to bring transparency in electoral politics, corporate donations to national political parties have increased by 109 per cent between the financial years 2017-18 and 2018-19. The ADR did this analysis on the information of donors released by the parties to the Election Commission. Interestingly, these are only the donations more than Rs 20,000 in a financial year.

The five political parties that ADR analyzed are the BJP, the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM). According to the report, during the financial year 2019-20, Congress received an amount of Rs 133.04 crore from 154 donors. Meanwhile NCP got Rs 57.086 crore from 36 corporate donors.

CPI (M) did not receive anything in the form of corporate donations

On the other hand, CPM has not shown any income from corporate donations during this financial year. According to the report, Prudent Electoral Trust topped the list of donations to BJP and Congress in 2019-20. The trust donated 38 times in a year to both the parties. The trust had donated a total of Rs 247.54 crore to both the parties. BJP received a total amount of Rs 710.407 crore as donations from total 2025 corporate donors.

The report said, “The BJP had announced a donation of Rs 216.75 crore from the Prudent Electoral Trust and the Congress had promised to receive a donation of Rs 31 crore from the trust.” At the same time, BG Shirke Construction Technology Pvt Ltd received the highest donation for the NCP in the financial year 2019-20. Out of the total donations, an amount of 22.312 crores also came from companies whose online information is not available.