Decision-Making At Dot Paralysed

More than three weeks after the telecom scandal broke, the tendering process in the department of telecommunications is reeling under the 'Sukh Ram effect'. DoT is sitting on about 20 tenders "" some dated as early as March 1995 "" and is yet to take a decision on procurement of some crucial equipment. This could have an adverse impact on the department's network expansion plans. The list of pending tenders includes some big orders for supply of jelly-filled cables, digital exchange equipment, optical fibre cables, optical line terminating equipment (OLTE), microwave radio equipment, line concentrators, multiplexers, pair gain systems, towers, solar generating stations and multi-access rural radio.

 

DoT officials admit that the tendering process has slowed down since there have been allegations of irregularities during former communications minister Sukh Ram's tenure. Leave alone taking a decision which deviates from the tender guidelines, even routine decision-making has slowed down, a telecom company official said.

The 'oldest' pending tender is for OLT synchronous digital hierarchy equipment, the bids for which were opened on March 27, 1995. The tender got bogged down in suppliers quoting both path- and shared-protection configurations for the equipment. There was controversy regarding which configuration DoT would decide in favour of.

Shared-protection equipment works out cheaper for the same traffic. DoT insiders say the order is likely to be placed in a few weeks. Fujitsu is likely to get the order because it has offered to supply shared-protection configured equipment at the rates it had offered for path-protection OLTE.

Other tenders which were opened in 1995 include analog line concentrators (September), digital pair gain systems, SDH analysers and MARR systems (November), digital line concentrators, 18 GHz microwave radio and towers (December). The 1996 tenders include those for multiplexers, digital telephone exchange equipment and echo cancellers.