New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party has received donations to the tune of over Rs 900 crore in the period between 2016 and 2018 from more than 1,500 corporate houses, a report said on Tuesday. The amount is more than 16 times of what the Congress received in the same period.

The report released by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) was prepared considering donations made by corporate houses to national political parties during 2016-18.

Between 2016 and 2018, corporates made donations of Rs 985.18 crore, out of which around 93 per cent went to political parties from known sources, the ADR report said in its analysis.

“Out of the six national parties, the BJP received the maximum donations of Rs 915.596 crore from 1,731 corporate donors, followed by the Congress which received a total contribution of Rs 55.36 crore from 151 corporate donors and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) with Rs 7.737 crore from 23 corporate donors in financial year 2016-17 and 2017-18,” the report stated.

Voluntary contributions of the BJP and the Congress was 94 per cent and 81 per cent, respectively, for donations from corporates above Rs 20,000 during the financial years 2016-17 and 2017-18.

The BJP received the maximum donations amounting to Rs 1,621.40 crore from corporates, making it 83.49 per cent of the total donations for a period of six years between financial years 2012-13 and 2017-18, news agency PTI said in its report.

The report claimed that corporate donations that national parties received spiked by around 160 per cent between 2004-05 and 2011-12, and between 2016-17 and 2017-18.

Between 2012-13 and 2017-18, corporate donations to national political parties increased by a whopping 414 per cent, though there was a significant drop in the percentage of corporate donations in general in 2015-16. The amount of donations that corporate houses contributed to national parties reduced by 25.07 per cent between financial years 2016-17 and 2017-18, the ADR analysis said.

The six national political parties that ADR took into account for the report are the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Indian National Congress (INC), the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Communist Party of India (CPI), the Communist Party (Marxist) and the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC).

The Bahujan Samaj Party, though being a national party, did not feature in the ADR analysis as the Mayawati party had claimed earlier that it hadn’t received any donations or voluntary contributions over Rs 20,000 from anyone during the period and since 2004, the ADR report stated.

The report also said that the CPI had the lowest share of corporate donations at 2 per cent.