Stating that there is confusion over the proposed amendment to the Reserve Bank of India Act to enable the issuance of electoral bonds, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said nothing apart from electoral reform and state funding could bring complete transparency in the poll process.
It may be mentioned that in a bid to increase transparency in donation received by political parties, the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced while presenting the Union Budget 2017 that political parties could accept donation of only Rs 2,000 in cash or the deal has to be through cheques or online transaction. He also announced that under the scheme of issuance of electoral bonds, a donor can buy a bond for a bank and deposit it to the bank account of the donation receiver that is a political party.
She said: "The matter of issuance of bond is confusing. We have no objection with the step to cap cash donation at Rs 2,000. Though we are assessing the proposed scheme of issuing of bond, I would like to raise a question that does it again going to be another scam?"
"We are not convinced why the bond?" she raised the question adding that state funding and electoral reform would have been the much easier in order to bring transparency in the poll process. It may be mentioned that Banerjee had been raising the demand of electoral reforms since the first day after forming Trinamool Congress.
She took a dig at the Centre stating that "An All Party Meeting was quite essential for this (taking decision to propose introduction of the bond issuance scheme)".
Banerjee, while addressing the state panchayat conference, raised the issue of the hasty and arbitrary decision of demonetisation and said that the Centre should release funds for development projects instead of lecturing.