Here's how to make sure funding for elections doesn't lead to corruption, quid pro quo deals

On January 2, 2018, then-finance minister Arun Jaitley attempted to overhaul and reform political financing in India, in what he later described in a Facebook post as “total clean money and substantial transparency coming into the system of political funding.” The government had announced the Electoral Bonds scheme to make India’s murky landscape of money and politics more transparent in line with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s anti-corruption campaign. In place of illegal cash, direct donations or funding via an electoral trust, individuals and corporations could now buy interest-free bearer bonds from authorised branches of the State Bank of India (SBI). Donors were promised anonymity by the government, and there was no cap on the number of bonds that could be bought.