In W.P. bearing No. 20698 of 2018, the Court disposed of a writ petition challenging the rejection of a technical bid due to an invalid MSE certificate. The Court found the rejection correct but noted the contract document allows for reconsideration upon representation under specific conditions.
This page shows the compact analysis of this judgement. The full analysis — procedural history, issue-by-issue holdings with ratio and obiter, advocates, and paragraph-level evidence for every claim — is being added to the record in batches and will appear here when this judgement has been through it.
W.P.(C). No. 20698 of 2018
3. 20.12.2018
By way of this writ petition, the petitioners have challenged rejection of their technical bid (communicated by email dated 16.11.2018 under Annexure-6) for the e-Tender inviting bids “For Transportation of Indane LPG Cylinders in vertical position on unit rate basis Ex-Balasore LPG Bottling Plant” vide Tender No.RCC/ERO/37/2018-19/PT-109. Further, the petitioner has prayed for accepting their price bid and to issue letter of intent in respect of six wheeler trucks offered by them.
In the technical evaluation process, it was found that the petitioner had submitted bid under MSE category. But, the UAN of MSE certificate of the petitioner was not valid. In that view of the matter, technical bid of the petitioner-firm was rejected. We find the said evaluation to be correct. At this juncture, Note-2 of the Clause-II Scope of Work of the tender document, which is reproduced hereunder, is relevant for our consideration.
“Note 2 : No. of trucks calculated based on 306 capacity type is given in Annexure-A for reference. From this, the number of the other category trucks are determined. For eg: Each 450/504 capacity truck = 1.5 * 306 capacity; each 306 capacity truck = 3*100 capacity.
In case of non-availability of 450 cylinder capacity trucks, equivalent nos. of 306 cylinder capacity trucks shall be inducted in this tender and vice versa.”
However, in view the Note-2 as quoted above, if the petitioner-firm makes a representation before the competent authority and if the authority wishes to take services of other contractors, the case of the petitioner-firm may be considered in accordance with law.
With the observation and direction as aforesaid, the writ petition is disposed of.
……..………………….. K.S. JHAVERI (Chief Justice)
ss
……..………………….. K.R. MOHAPATRA (Judge)
Petitioner
K.S. JHAVERI
K.R. MOHAPATRA
As recorded by the court registry
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