Railways tender ‘tailor-made’ to favour private player
Mahendra Singh, TNN | Nov 6, 2014, 03.31AM IST
NEW DELHI: In what appears to be another scam in the
railways, officials inflated the requirement of coaches for 2013-14 and then
came out with "tailor-made" criteria to favour a particular private
company.
Documents with TOI suggest that officials in the Railway
Board justified the requirement of 500 GS (general second-class) coaches to be
procured from public sector unit BEML and 'other sources' under the coach
production programme for 2013-14.
This was in addition to the demand of 1,150-1,200 coaches
being met by railway undertakings such as the Integral Coach Factory and Rail
Coach Factory (Kapurthala and Rae Bareli) for the same year.
In June 2013, railways invited tenders from private players
for the additional 500 GS coaches at an expected cost of around Rs 250 crore.
The tender process is still to be finalized.
The order raised eyebrows in railways as procurement was
being sought from private parties that had never manufactured GS coaches even
as the manufacturing capacity of departmental units — ICF and RCF — was still
to be exhausted.
A senior railways official told TOI that many posts and
positions in newly set up Rai Bareli coach factory were not made operational on
the plea that there weren't enough production orders.
TOI has found that the tender conditions were tailor-made to
suit a Kolkata-based private company and specifications were inserted to cut
out competition.
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The shortlisted company has never produced or supplied GS
coaches. Yet it was chosen because the tender document broadened the criteria
to include manufacturing experience of other coaches. The tender state,
"Bulk orders will be done from established manufacturers...who have
successfully executed order of main line passenger coaches/EMU/MEMU/DEMU and
should have been in operation for at least two years with satisfactory
performance."
Once the precedent was set, railways again decided to
procure 169 coaches from 'other sources' for the current year (2014-15).
A BSP MP has written to railway minister Sadananda Gowda,
alleging a scam in the tender process. He said that the quantity of the
purchase order, around 500 coaches, was inflated, and that a West Bengal-based
company was being favoured.
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