New Delhi, Nov 4 : Infosys mentor N.R. Narayana Murthy made a personal contribution of Rs 12 lakh to Arvind Kejriwal's Public Cause Research Foundation in 2010-11. He is among several other corporate donors, Delhi newspaper Mail Today reported.
Mumbai-based stock broking firm Enam Securities owned by Vallabh Bhansali donated Rs 2 lakh while Tata Social Welfare Trust gave a cheque of Rs 25 lakh, the report said.
Vikram Lal of Eicher gave a cheque of Rs 3 lakh from his Eicher Goodearth Trust, while Nimesh Kampani's JM Financial Foundation donated Rs 50,000, says the report.
Other contributions came from IndusInd Bank boss and top banker Romesh Sobti, who earlier headed ABN AMRO Bank in India.
Manish Sisodia, Kejriwal's close associate and Public Cause Research Foundation trustee, said, "Some of the corporate leaders like Narayana Murthy have actively supported us. He had some good ideas and took active interest besides his financial contribution and was also a jury member on our RTI awards."
Public Cause Research Foundation's balance sheet accessed by Mail Today shows the trust got Rs 96.5 lakh from eminent names in the world of business and finance.
The list is long and it features Sanjiv Bikhchandani of naukri.com who gave Rs 50,000.
The Bangalore-based Kasturi Trust provided a corpus of Rs 25 lakh to Kejriwal's foundation.
Jagan Nath Gupta Memorial Education Society that runs several management institutes across the country gave a donation of Rs 13 lakh.
The courier company Safe Express gave Rs 1 lakh while top law firm Luthra and Luthra Law office provided Rs 50,000.
Public Cause Research Foundation, which received these donations, is a Delhi-based NGO that was founded on December 19, 2006 by Kejriwal, his IAC associate Manish Sisodia and TV producer and writer Abhinandan Sekhri.
Kejriwal donated the prize money of his Magsaysay Award as the main corpus to fund the NGO. Besides Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan and Kiran Bedi are the other trustees of the foundation.
The audited report of the NGO says, "During the year, the trust has also taken up a new activity namely IAC."
The funding seeded the Jan Lokpal campaign which was spearheaded by Public Cause Research Foundation besides some of Kejriwal's other NGOs.
At the heart of his direct democracy campaign is complete decentralisation. It goes much further than Panchayati Raj 'areas', each consisting of only 3,000 voters.
In 2012, the Public Cause Research Foundation received Rs 31 lakh in donations to its general fund.
Interestingly, while the details of the donors for 2012 are not available in its audit report, Kejriwal's men also acknowledge that not all their donors, who gave them cheques proved to be genuine. They were also saddled with several cheques which bounced.
