Haryana Government has directed all departments, boards and corporations to strictly comply with the guidelines to stop collusion or bid rigging by the firms in various tendering processes.

“The Competition Commission of India, during an “Interactive meeting towards Institutionalization of the Mechanism for Establishing Competition Culture in Policy Making and Governance” held recently has mentioned some warning signs of collusion or bid rigging by the firms in various tendering processes,” said a spokesman of Haryana Supplies and Disposals Department.

He said that these signs included the same supplier is often the lowest bidder, there is a geographic allocation of winning tenders, bids from different companies contain similar  handwriting or typeface or use identical forms or stationery, the bid is coming from same IP and in case of online bidding, certain companies always submit bids but never win, sudden and identical increase in price or price ranges by bidders that cannot be explained by cost increases and two or more businesses submit a joint bid even though at least one of them could have bid  on its own.

He said that it has been directed that in case such a scenario is observed, action as provided in the rules that is forfeiture of Earnest Money Deposit (EMD) or blacklisting of firms as provided in Detailed Notice Inviting Tender (DNIT) may be taken against the concerned firm. In case the quantum of collusion of bid rigging is of substantial nature, petition may be filed under Section 19 (1) (b) of the Competition Act, 2002 or other relevant sections before Competition Commission of India.

All the Heads of the Departments, Managing Directors, Chief Administrators of the Boards and Corporations, Universities in the state and all Deputy Commissioners have been directed to ensure the strict compliance of these instructions, said the spokesman.

He further said that the State Government had decided to implement e-procurement system through single web portal for the entire state with the objective of uniformity of processes, transparency and efficiency.

It has been decided that while submitting a change request, a time of alteast two to three months may be given to the Nodal Department for any change request implementation before it is finally put in the operation since various test plans covering test cases, test results, preparing test data and carry out necessary acceptance test correlating to functional requirements are required to be ensured.

The modalities regarding implementation of change requests on single e-Procurement Portal was under the consideration of this office as a Nodal Department, he added.