Party donations, read from Form 24A

Donations above ₹20,000 reported by political parties to the Election Commission, 2022–2026

Every political party in India has to tell the Election Commission about each donation above ₹20,000, on a form called 24A. The Commission puts these reports on its website. Most of them are scans of printed pages, often stamped and signed, sometimes slightly crooked, and you cannot search them or add them up.

This release reads those scans and turns the donation rows into a table. The hard part was not reading them but knowing when the reading is right. A misread digit or a name that runs into the next line could put the wrong amount next to a real person's name, so every row had to earn its place.

Only two kinds of rows are published. Either the rows of a page add up exactly to the total the party printed, or the same donation, with the same amount and a similar name, also appears in the transcription that ADR / MyNeta made by hand. Of 38,560 rows read, 22,822 passed. The other 15,738 are left out.

Nothing personal beyond the name goes out. PAN numbers were used only to tell a person from a company and were never saved, and addresses were dropped.

Download

Plain CSV files, UTF-8, with a header row.
Hugging Face dataset →

File	Holds	Rows	Size	SHA-256
form24a_donations.csv	One row per verified donation: year, party, donor name as read, amount, mode, date, how it was verified, source PDF and page	22,822	4.5 MB	`4737b190aadb899c4ed6aeea02b38c9c0d178a07b7118d1f4e7a16762c169974`
form24a_documents.csv	One row per Form 24A report: rows read, their sum, the total the party printed, and whether they match	151	18 KB	`52fa41bee8a90311328933ac390d6fd69e82ef963d9fb0044fb5f84d5c51a6a8`
electoral_trust_documents.csv	The same check for electoral trust reports	53	6 KB	`b2d1e8f98fe7cce2394d55da4961bd18ce32262f4166b1de4fdaac2810982e39`
party_expenditure_documents.csv	The same check for party election expenditure statements	281	46 KB	`4066f3d73b4649d3fa33a06a4b049a53c5f50edf4035f8d1aca47d00a261b2a6`

The full method, with every rule and every column, is in METHODOLOGY.md. The original PDFs are in the source documents release.

Quick start

import duckdb
duckdb.sql("""
  SELECT fy, party_from_filename, count(*) AS rows, sum(amount_rs) / 1e7 AS crore
  FROM read_csv('hf://datasets/shreyamm/party-donations-form24a/data/form24a_donations.csv')
  GROUP BY ALL ORDER BY crore DESC LIMIT 10
""").show()

What is in it

	Count
Verified donation rows	22,822
Their total	₹5,539.7 crore
Form 24A reports they come from	63
Rows where the whole page adds up to the printed total	746
Rows that agree with the ADR / MyNeta transcription	22,076
Rows whose name text should be checked before quoting	6,166

By year

Financial year	Rows	₹ crore
2022-23	8,975	863.8
2023-24	7,827	1,648.2
2024-25	5,918	2,701.1
2025-26	102	326.7

By party (verified rows only, so these are lower bounds)

Party	Rows	₹ crore
Bharatiya Janata	13,102	4,192.0
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam	530	590.4
Indian National Congress	2,710	234.7
All India Trinamool Congress	554	189.9
Telugu Desam	267	86.9
All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam	51	67.0
Aam Aadmi	3,803	63.7
Biju Janata Dal	4	60.0
Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress	4	16.0
Janasena	71	13.7
Indian Union Muslim League	1,177	7.8
Jannayak Janta	130	3.1

How it was read

Each page was turned into an image at 200 dpi and read with Tesseract. Reports that were typed rather than scanned were read from their text directly.
Words were grouped into rows by their position on the page. A row is kept when it has an amount of at least ₹1,000 in the amount column; the serial number, name, mode and date are read from the same line.
Every total the party printed was collected, and the rows of each section were added up and compared with it.
A report is only read once every one of its pages has been read. Half-read documents are skipped.

How it was checked

Totals. Of 151 Form 24A reports, 31 add up exactly to the party's printed total. The check for every report is published, including the ones that do not add up.
A second reading. Rows from reports that do not add up are kept only if ADR / MyNeta's hand transcription has the same amount and a similar name for the same party and year. Each of their rows can confirm only one of ours.
No PANs. An automated check makes sure no PAN-shaped string is anywhere in the published file.

Limitations of this release

The donor name is what the OCR read. It sometimes carries a town or a bit of the address, or is only a place name. donor_text_needs_check marks 6,166 such rows. Please look at the source page before you name anyone.
The amount is the field that was checked. The name is not checked in the same way.
Financial years 2022–23 to 2025–26 only, and only rows that passed, so party totals here are lower than the real ones.
Electoral trust reports and expenditure statements could not be read reliably row by row. Only their document-level checks are published (53 and 281 documents).
Party names are taken from the Election Commission's file names and are not cleaned up.
Giving money to a party is legal and has to be disclosed. Nothing here suggests wrongdoing by any donor or party.