BSNL protest on Madhya Pradesh’s smart cities tender
Government-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) wants revaluation of its technical bid for the Madhya Pradesh government’s ‘smart city’ project, for a tender to build command and control centres, as well as integrated data and disaster recovery centres, in seven cities. At present, the award is reportedly likely to go to US-based HP Enterprises (HPE).
In a letter a few days earlier to the chief executive of Bhopal Smart City Development Corporation Ltd (which issued the tender on behalf of all the cities), BSNL contends the technical evaluation was belowpar as far as its performance went, in proof of concept and the technical proposal. “BSNL looks at this as a serious deviation from considering and giving equal opportunity to a central government public sector enterprise,” went its letter.
Also, it says HPE, in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers (which was also appointed a consultant to the MP government’s project), is setting up a centre of excellence in Kolkata to jointly build a smart city platform for global smart city opportunities. It says “there is high probability that this partnership has worked in their favour”.
BSNL has also argued that HPE has quoted a price which is ~24 crore more than the lowest price offered by BSNL (the lowest bid was ~275 crore). Copies of the letter were also sent to the state government’s chief secretary and to the secretary, electronics and information technology, of the central government, beside the mission director of the Centre’s smart cities project.
Leading Indian companies — including Wipro, Larsen & Toubro, Tech Mahindra and UST Global — had participated in the bids for setting up the infrastructure in Bhopal and Indore, among other citiess. A Prive Waterhouse spokesperson said: “This is an ongoing client engagement. We do not comment on specific client engagements.”
A spokesperson of HPE said: “HPE has a long and successful history in India and HPE has delivered the technology and services required for major smart city projects around the world. While we cannot comment on confidential details of our commercial tenders. HPE adheres to high standards of business conduct.”
BSNL says it was positioned fifth in the technical score, though it gave a nodeviation certificate as required by the tender and was able to answer every query raised by the evaluation committee. BSNL had a consortium with Fluent Grid and Hitachi, which together bid for the project. It says Hitachi’s command centre is one of the most robust of systems and they’re already implementing the command control centre for the Andhra government. While Fluent Grid has already implemented a pioneering and largest commercial system for power utilities on the cloud, serving 10 million customers in Uttar Pradesh. Those involved in the tender says the winning bid was to be decided through a fairly new method of evaluation, called a quality cost basis system. Under this, there are much more points and weightage for the technical evaluation than for the price.
Under this system, the winner does not have to match the lowest price . “We would have been okay if the winner (bid) was based on the assumption that it was better in quality and technical parameters, and was asked to match the lowest price or L1. In this case, it is not and that seems a worrisome trend,”says a senior executive of a company which had also bid for the project.