DH Exclusive | UIDAI letters term IBM’s demands ‘unreasonable’

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) had termed IBM’s demands including the suspension of the bidding process for the Rs 1,642 crore tender for Aadhaar-related project “unreasonable” before rejecting them.

In a fresh set of letters exchanged between UIDAI and IBM, accessed by DH, the UIDAI’s legal team had said: “... It is stated that UIDAI isn’t obliged to honour any of the unreasonable and arbitrary demands made by you in para 10 of the present letter.”

In a letter dated July 21, 2020, the technology major IBM had sought redressal of various concerns it had raised about the evaluation of the bidding process for awarding managed services infrastructure provider (MSIP) contract.

Subsequently, the legal team of UIDAI, in its letter dated September 10, 2020, responded stating that IBM’s demands were unreasonable.

In its letter, among other measures, IBM had demanded UIDAI to suspend the bidding process related to the RFP and refrain from taking any decision on it; provide the minutes of the meeting of the technical evaluation committee convened to evaluate the bids. It had also demanded inviting IBM, or any other interested bidder, to present their objection and inputs; constitute an independent committee of technical experts chosen from a panel of nominees proposed by IBM and the other bidder to re-evaluate HPE’s technical offer. It had also asked for the suspension of HPE from the bidding process.

While rejecting the demands raised by IBM, the legal team of UIDAI had said that the company, as part of RFP, had agreed not to “question the evaluation of technical bids.” The statutory body, in its letter also said that it reserves the right to reject any bid “without assigning any reason” according to the RFP documents.

The fresh letter of UIDAI also confirmed that the HP-Enterprises (HPE) was given 98% marks in the technical evaluation of the project as reported by DH earlier.

While UIDAI and IBM didn’t respond to the questions, HPE maintained its previous response.

In 2019, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) -- a statutory body mandated to collect data on Aadhaar, had last year floated tenders for contracting a managed services infrastructure provider (MSIP) to build India’s largest private cloud for data management, which would be fully automated.

Earlier this year, the authority commenced the bid evaluation process for the project.