New Delhi, May 26 The High Court of Punjab and Haryana has directed Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd to give reasons for disqualifying the offer from Nokia Siemens Networks for the PSU’s 93-million GSM line. The court has set a deadline of Wednesday afternoon for BSNL to file its response.
Finnish telecom equipment company Nokia Siemens had challenged BSNL’s decision to disqualify its bids on technical grounds. NSN’s primary grouse was that it had supplied equipment to BSNL on previous occasions and, therefore, it was unfair to find technical problems with its bid. NSN alleged that BSNL had designed the tender to favour some vendors. According to NSN, the PSU had not explained what technical deficiencies have been found in its bid. In a letter to the Department of Telecom, NSN said that it had clarified all questions BSNL had raised during the valuation of the technical bids.
The High Court told NSN that it can approach the Bench again if it was not satisfied with the reasons given by BSNL. During the proceedings today, counsel for BSNL asked for more time to submit the reasons but the court declined.
On May 15, BSNL opened the financial bids submitted by Ericsson and Huawei for its 93-million line GSM contract estimated to be worth Rs 30,000 crore. Ericsson had been short-listed for North and East zones. Though Huawei had qualified for West, East and South zones, BSNL opened the bid only for the South zone after security agencies raised concerns about giving contracts to Chinese manufacturers.
Other bidders, including ZTE, Nokia Siemens and Alcatel Lucent, were disqualified on technical grounds and so their financial bids were not opened. Disqualified from bidding for the project, Nokia Siemens had sought the intervention of the Competition Commission of India and the Central Vigilance Commission on the grounds that the tendering process was not transparent. It had raised questions on the disqualification, given that the Finnish company supplies equipment to operators worldwide, including Vodafone and Bharti Airtel in India. The company told the CCI that if its equipment was good enough for BSNL’s previous contracts then how could it be disqualified on technical grounds for the new project.
Nokia Siemens also highlighted the lack of competition in the bidding process since BSNL’s technical committee qualified bids from only one equipment supplier in three of the four zones. BSNL may have lost out in getting the best price in the process.
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