Reporters Without Orders Ep 314: Decoding electoral bonds data, patterns of funding

This week, host Tanishka Sodhi is joined by Newslaundry’s Prateek Goyal and Basant Kumar.

Both Prateek and Basant share their experience of investigating the patterns in political funding in India, and decoding the State Bank of India’s data dump on electoral bonds. 

They discuss how they found out about “a very strange pattern” of donation to political parties, with some companies donating or lapping up their donations after raids by central agencies. In some cases, the companies’ donations even surpassed their profit growth and revenue.

Tune in.

Timecodes

00:00:00 - Introduction

00:02:21 - Donations to parties

00:05:18 - Electoral bonds

00:25:22 - Recommendations

Recommendations

Basant

Project Electoral Bond (Report)

Prateek

Maamla Legal Hai

Tanishka

Plunder of the Aravallis

Produced and edited by Saif Ali Ekram, and recorded by Anil Kumar.