'Cost of primary education (class 1 to 5) has increased by 31% between 2014 and 2018, shows a comparison of National Statistical Office or NSO (formerly National Sample Survey Office) survey reports for the 71st Round and 75th Round. This is mainly fuelled by a staggering increase in private schools, both aided and unaided varieties. Similar increases have taken place in other higher levels of education, the reports show...'
Electoral bonds are bearer bonds, introduced as a mechanism for individuals and companies to donate money to political parties in India in 2018 by the BJP government. They were introduced without consultation and ignoring objections of the Election Commission and the RBI. Electoral bonds worth Rs.
'Though the Ministry of Finance had thought about sharing details of the electoral bond scheme with political parties and seeking the public’s comments on it, the idea was dropped after a presentation before the prime minister on August 21, 2017... RTI activist Bharadwaj says it is apparent that during the meeting with the prime minister, the decision to not consult political parties and not circulate the draft scheme to all national and state parties with a 15-day window to seek their comments was taken.
'The Bhartiya Janta Party took a large donation from a company that is now being probed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for facilitating “terror funding,” financial declarations by the BJP itself reveal. RKW Developers Ltd, a company at the heart of a probe by the ED for carrying out transactions with and buying properties from the late Iqbal Memon alias Iqbal Mirchi – an accused in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts and a close aide of mafia boss Dawood Ibrahim – gave money to the ruling party, according to the BJP’s filings with the Election Commission.
'The controversy over electoral bonds has resurfaced, this time after a five-part investigative series by Nitin Sethi that was published in HuffPost India. The series alleged that the government lied, bent rules and repeatedly ignored objections raised by various stakeholders. To demand answers, the Congress protested at the Parliament’s Gandhi Statue on Friday/ The party’s MP’s have been demanding that the ruling BJP government — especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi — break the silence over the issue...
'The Prime Minister’s Office under Narendra Modi reportedly ordered for rules about electoral bonds – which the Centre itself had notified just two months earlier – to be broken in March 2018, ahead of assembly elections in six states. The broken rules, Nitin Sethi reports for HuffPost India, were first called an ‘exception’ but quickly turned into the norm. The report is based on government documents obtained under the Right to Information Act by transparency activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired)...
'Before unveiling the electoral bonds scheme – which renders political funding more opaque and allows parties to receive unlimited amounts of money without having to disclose where it came from – the Narendra Modi government ignored the Reserve Bank of India’s recommendation not to go ahead with it, HuffPost India has reported. Four days before Arun Jaitley was to announce the scheme in his Budget speech of 2017, a tax official going through the documents realised that the change would require amendments to the Reserve Bank of India Act, Nithin Sethi reports.
'The Tatas-controlled Progressive Electoral Trust contributed ₹356 crore to the BJP in the financial year leading up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, making it the top donor to the party in 2018-19 among those listed as having contributed more than ₹20,000 that the BJP had submitted to the Election Commission of India... This disclosure does not include the funding received through electoral bonds. According to the election watchdog, Association for Democratic Reforms, electoral bonds worth ₹6,128 crore have been sold since the scheme was introduced in 2018 till October this year.
'As many as 12,313 electoral bonds worth Rs 6,128 crore were sold by the State Bank of India, the only entity authorised to sell them in the country, between March 2018 and October 2019, an analysis by the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) has revealed. ADR is a non-partisan NGO that works in the field of electoral and political reforms... Electoral bonds have been widely criticised for their opacity and are available in denominations varying from Rs 1,000 to Rs 1 crore. Any Indian citizen can buy them and deposit it in the account of any political party...
'Within a week of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections coming to a close, the Election Commission (EC) constituted working groups headed by senior functionaries to review specific areas of concern. The EC need not have bothered with this post mortem; it is clear to everyone that this election was dominated by three ‘M’s: money, machine and media. The fourth ‘M’ – the model code of conduct – was reduced to waste paper.
