5 months ago
1
Flagging systemic vulnerabilities successful the existing e-procurement processes for submission of bids for nationalist works, the High Court of Karnataka has ordered a technological overhaul of the State’s e-procurement infrastructure and mandated integration of high-level automation and real-time verification of tender documents to destruct the systemic fraud presently plaguing the process.
The tribunal said that each nationalist procurement processes successful Karnataka should mandate physics submission of tender documents done the e-procurement portal.
Establish EPIs
Instead of transmitting documents, submitted by the bidders done the e-procurement portal, done manual intervention, the tribunal said the State authorities should found and operationalise Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) betwixt the e-procurement portal and databases maintained assorted nationalist authorities for auto-verifying the tender documents.
Justice Suraj Govindaraj issued the directions portion dismissing a petition filed by Anantha Krishna Shetty, a contractor. The petitioner had questioned his debarment, nether the Rule 26A of the Karnataka Transparency successful Public Procurements (KTPP) Rules, 2000, from information successful nationalist tender process for submitting fabricated licences, non-existing enactment orders, and inflated enactment certificates portion submitting a bid with Mangaluru City Corporation.
Pointing retired that it is not an isolated lawsuit of submission of forged tender documents, the tribunal said specified a inclination has not lone caused a immense nonaccomplishment to nationalist exchequer but has besides damaged integrity of the bidding strategy too causing a surge successful litigations.
“The integrity of nationalist procurement is not simply an administrative imperative but a law mandate flowing from the principles of Article 14 (equality) and Article 19 of the Constitution, arsenic it straight impacts the prime of nationalist works, compliance with applicable rules, state to transportation retired commercialized and profession, and extortion of nationalist resources,” the tribunal observed.
Automatic verification
API integration should enabled with licensing and regulatory and fiscal authorities similar Registrar of Companies, GST India Portal, Reserve Bank of India, banks and fiscal institutions, nonrecreational councils, boards, biology agencies; and State-owned enterprises, astute metropolis entities, infrastructure improvement boards, municipal corporations, gram panchayats, territory administrations, etc., the tribunal said.
Stating that the tender documents should beryllium submitted successful specified searchable formats of PDF/Excel, the tribunal said tender documents should not simply beryllium scanned files, but searchable and accompanied by cardinal identifying details specified arsenic issuing authority, notation numbers, contented dates and validity periods arsenic this metadata enables automatic matching with the database of assorted regulatory and fiscal authorities without requiring manual intervention.
Tracking
The e-procurement portal, the tribunal said, should support a real-time analytics dashboard accessible to the State Finance Department and different authorities acrophobic to way department0wise mendacious papers frequency, papers benignant vulnerability, verification occurrence rate, debarred contractors, repetition violators, etc.
A sanitised mentation of the analytics dashboard (excluding contractor-identifiable information) should beryllium published quarterly connected the State e-Governance portal to beforehand transparency and deter fraud, the tribunal said.
