NEW DELHI: Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar on Saturday stressed the need for a mechanism to check “unaccounted” donations while also ensuring donors’ privacy is protected and they are not harassed.Responding to a question on electoral bonds during the press conference to announce the schedule for Lok Sabha elections, Kumar said, “As far as electoral bonds are concerned, the Commission has always been in favour of transparency”.”In democracy, there is no scope for hiding things, it is all about making everybody know, we are all for transparency. This is the first part of the exercise that it must be known, the country now has to ask and find solutions through an institutional mechanism where the donor’s privacy is also considered,” he said.In its landmark verdict on February 15, the top court had scrapped the Centre’s electoral bonds scheme that allowed anonymous political funding, calling it “unconstitutional” and ordered disclosure by the EC of donors, the amount donated by them and the recipients.
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