Cuttack: Orissa High Court has cleared the deck for the state government to invite fresh tenders to procure schoolbags for primary students.
The high court endorsed the government's decision on Friday after initially imposing restrictions on its move to cancel the tender process to purchase schoolbags.
The government had announced that it would provide schoolbags free of cost to students from classes I to V in both government and government-aided schools in 2017-18. Accordingly, the Odisha Primary Education Programme Authority invited tenders for schoolbags worth nearly Rs 16 crore last August. Twenty-seven parties responded to the tender, but bidders were disqualified in the technical bid stage, while another 15 were disqualified in the sample bid stage. The remaining four qualified for the financial bid.
But when an authority-appointed committee for the process took up the four bidders for the final bid, it observed that their samples had some deviations that could not be verified simply by laboratory testing.
Subsequently, based upon its observations, the authority cancelled the tender. But, legal tangle had stopped the procurement process so far. One of the bidders - International Trade Link - moved the high court for intervention against the cancellation. The high court had issued an interim stay on the process last October.
While the petition was being heard, two bidders filed intervention petitions supporting the cancellation of the tender process, while another bidder opposed it.
"The division bench of Chief Justice Vineet Saran and Justice B.R. Sarangi validated the government's decision to invite fresh tenders on grounds that testing of samples by the bidders had not been done in a proper manner and that there were discrepancies in the sample test result sheet," said Arun Kumar Budhia, counsel for one of the interveners.
The court also endorsed the decision to cancel the tender as it was done by invoking statutory provisions that allowed the authority to cancel the tender without assigning any reason to avoid confusion.
