Marketing Board rebuts allegations in process of digitization tender
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HP State Agricultural Marketing Board (HPSAMB) has strongly rebutted the claim regarding irregularities in process of digitization tender floated by the Board.
A Spokesperson of the HPSAMB said today that tender process was not compromised in any way as claimed by the Leader of Opposition. His statement was inaccurate and far from actual realities and the fact is that all the codal formalities have been completed by the evaluation committee for the tender process.
He said the Board has issued a request for proposal for selection of system integrator for design, development, implementation and maintenance of its integrated management system. This RFP was issued in compliance to the announcement made by the Chief Minister in the budget speech of 2024-25.
In order to prepare the tender document, a consultant for said task was hired from HP State Electronics Development Corporation and as per the Himachal Pradesh Financial Rules -2009, a tender committee was constituted to evaluate, award and implement the design, development, implementation and maintenance of integrated management system. The necessary codal formalities as mandated under the financial rules were completed for preparation of the RFP document. After the preparation of the RPF document, the tender committee floated the same by giving wide publicity in the leading newspapers.
The Spokesperson said the tender committee after floating the tender, as per the mandate evaluated the tenders and prospective bidders were finalized after giving them the opportunity to submit their representations with regard to the requirement of mandatory documents as per the RFP document. The committee duly notified for the purpose after due diligence and as per the terms and conditions of the tender document invited the qualified bidders to give technical presentation as required in RFP.
He said that the committee evaluated the bidders on the basis of technical presentation and accordingly qualified bidders as per the terms and conditions of the RFP was given The Letter of Intent (LoI) for the award of the work for the digitization process.
However, after issuance of the LoI, the qualified bidder made representation to the tender committee to include the GST in addition to quoted price citing that same was not mentioned in the Bill of Quantities (BoQ). The appropriate authority taking into the consideration the representation decided that the bidders were required to quote the price for the digitization process inclusive of GST, and hence decided to rescind the tender, as bidder failed to comply with the tender conditions as per the RFP document.
He said that in entire tender process, all mandatory guidelines of the government and financial rules were adhered by the evaluation committee and at no point of time the tender was awarded by taking into consideration the inclusion of the GST, as represented by the qualified bidder, as claimed in the media reports.
Moreover, the committee declined to entertain the request of the Bidder for the inclusion of the GST in the quoted price, and according the tender was rescinded. In the entire process the tender committee comprising of officials drawn from IT department and others drawn from specialized field such as accounts, marketing, legal etc., followed the canons of financial rules in letter and spirit.
