On March 14, the Election Commission of India made public the names of the companies that had purchased electoral bonds. Almost immediately, The Hindu data team published the full list of the donors online. Our first electoral bonds story for the print edition was straightforward: it carried information on the companies that had donated the largest funds. But given time constraints, we could do little analysis on the nature of these companies.
The next day, we studied the list and found that many of the companies were unfamiliar. Some of them had sister concerns and all of them had donated to various political parties. We had to find out who owned these companies in order to contextualise the transactions. And there was no dearth of speculation on the data. Hours after the news broke, some said on social media that many of the companies were under the scrutiny of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Income Tax (IT) Department. Some said many pharma companies that had been reprimanded by regulators were on the list. Some identified companies that had been given a clean chit by various committees. But where could we get credible information to fact-check these claims?
That is when the grunt work began. We found out when and for what reasons the ED and IT Department were investigating some of these companies and when these companies had purchased bonds. The dateline of old stories in the media helped us find out when companies had come under the scanner of agencies and the new data showed us how they purchased bonds worth crores of rupees just days later. Old stories about some of the companies securing government contracts helped us question whether there was quid pro quo.
