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The Tata Group donated Rs 758 crore to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) weeks after the Union government announced over Rs 44,000 crore in subsidies to two of its semiconductor units, an investigation by Scroll.in has revealed. The donations were made in April 2024, days before the general election.
Two semiconductor units of Tata Group – one each in Assam and Gujarat, both BJP-governed states – were approved by the Union Cabinet in February 2024. The Union government has committed to a 50% subsidy on such projects, as part of the India Semiconductor Mission to make India a global hub for semiconductor manufacturing.
Tata Group received these government subsidies for two units – a semiconductor fabrication facility by Tata Electronics in Dholera, Gujarat in partnership with Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (PSMC) with an investment of Rs 91,000 crore, and a semiconductor assembly and test facility in Morigaon, Assam, with an investment of Rs 27,000 crore. The Union government subsidies for these two units reportedly add up to about Rs 44,023 crore.
Soon after the Tata Group’s semiconductor units were approved by the Union Cabinet in February 2024, the business conglomerate donated Rs 757.6 crore to BJP through the Progressive Electoral Trust, as per the party’s annual contribution report for FY 2024-25 submitted to the Election Commission of India (ECI). The report specifies that though the contributions and donations are all dated October 24, 2025, the date must be read as April 2, 2024 instead.
Various firms of the Tata Group including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Tata Motors and Tata Steel were found to have contributed a total of Rs 915 crore to Progressive Electoral Trust, which is backed by the Tata Group itself.
On the same day, Progressive Electoral Trust donated that amount to 10 different political parties. BJP received the biggest chunk – Rs 757.6 crore or 83% of the total amount.
Congress was the second biggest recipient, with a donation of Rs 77.3 crore.
Eight other political parties – All India Trinamool Congress, YSR Congress Party, Shiv Sena, Biju Janata Dal, Bharat Rashtra Samithi, Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), Janata Dal (United), and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam – received Rs 10 crore each.
BJP has been the biggest beneficiary of political funding through electoral trusts and now-suspended electoral bonds in recent years.
An electoral trust is a trust set up by companies to facilitate donations from companies and individuals to political parties. The scheme was introduced by the UPA government in 2013.
Electoral trusts are required to disclose their sources of funding and the political parties the funds are distributed to. However, it’s difficult to directly connect which donor is funding which party. In this case, all the donations disclosed by the Progressive Electoral Trust this year have come from companies of Tata Group alone.
For the preceding two years, Progressive Electoral Trust had declared that it didn’t receive any donations. But in 2018-19, it was BJP’s biggest donor, contributing Rs 356 crore.
Progressive Electoral Trust has previously claimed to decide each party’s share of donations based on its seat share. However, while BJP received 83% of the trust’s donations declared this year, its seat share in the previous Lok Sabha was only 56%.
