E-tendering to save Rs 5,000 cr annually for Yogi govt

The process has now become mandatory for contracts above the value of Rs 1 lakh

The Yogi Adityanath government is looking at saving almost Rs 5,000 crore annually in expenditure through e-tendering of contracts, which becomes mandatory in government departments and public utilities from Friday.

While, the process of e-tendering was first introduced in Uttar Pradesh on February 1, 2008 as a pilot project and was adopted by various departments during the intermediate time, the process has now become mandatory for contracts above the value of Rs one lakh.

However, contracts pertaining to kshetra panchayats and gram sabhas have for the time being exempted from e-tendering owing to the lack of necessary administrative infrastructure.

UP additional chief secretary (IT and electronics) Sanjiv Saran said of the annual UP budget of about Rs 4 lakh crore, public contracts worth almost Rs 70,000 crore pertaining to Public Works Department (PWD), irrigation etc were awarded annually through tendering process.

“Since, e-tendering is designed to weed out corruption in the tendering process and spur competition, we are confident that the government would be able to save almost Rs 5,000 crore in spending owing to competitive bidding by private contractors,” he told Business Standard.

The IT and electronics department, which is the nodal department for the implementation of the e-tendering process in UP, had on May 12, 2017 issued a Government Order (GO) to all the departments, public sector corporations, development authorities, municipal corporations, autonomous bodies and local bodies to implement e-tendering in  totality by September 1, 2017.

Saran informed since e-tendering had already been implemented by various departments, between April 2017 and August 30, 2017, the government departments had been able to attract almost 63,000 bids through e-tendering.

He said the GO had not altered the relevant laws and norms of the tendering process while mandating e-tendering.

“Since e-tendering offers anonymity to contractors, who can now submit their bids from anywhere without their physical presence or be disclosing their identity to other parties, we are confident it would leave out the mafia elements from the bidding process,” he added.

Yogi government has speeded up the process of establishing e-offices, which is a paperless and digitised version of administrative processes in departments.

The secretariat administration department is the nodal department for the e-office project and the government is targetting to implement e-office project fully by January 2018.