DH Exclusive | UIDAI's vigilance head chaired controversial MSIP's technical evaluation team

The person heading the committee to evaluate the bids for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)’s managed services infrastructure provider (MSIP) was the very person to whom grievances regarding the bids had to be forwarded.

It was UIDAI’s vigilance head Y L P Rao who headed the committee to evaluate the controversial Rs 1,642-crore bids.

While the technical committee gave the highest marks to HP-Enterprises during its evaluation, three other bidders -- Wipro, IBM and Dell -- had questioned the process in their letters to the Central Vigilance Commissioner.

However, according to the CVC rules, such complaints are normally forwarded to the Chief Vigilance Officer (CVO) of the organisation concerned since they pertain to “redressal of grievances” and matters related to government tender

Read: DH Exclusive | Aadhaar-related project bid process unfair: 3 IT firms

In this case, the CVO of the UIDAI, whom the letter was forwarded to, was Y L P Rao himself. He held the post of Deputy Director-General and CVO at the UIDAI. According to the law, he had to investigate a complaint against his own decision of awarding the highest marks (98 out of 100) to HP-Enterprise, which was questioned by other bidders.

Sources in the government told DH that one of the three bidders had raised objections over the forwarding of their grievances to Rao, but to no avail. The sources further say that Rao, an Indian Forest Services Officer of the 1986 batch who was working with Aadhaar on deputation, returned to his parent cadre of Maharashtra on September 30, 2020. However, the UIDAI rejected the complaints of other bidders.

There are two documents pertaining to correspondence between bidders and the UIDAI, in possession of DH, showing that Rao, who was the CVO of the UIDAI, also headed the technical evaluation committee. Rao, vide order number T110014/95/2018-Tech/Vol-III dated March 16, 2020, was appointed as the chairman of the technical evaluation committee by the UIDAI.

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

The other five members of the committee included Bhawna Garg (Deputy Director-General, Regional Office, Chandigarh), Anup Kumar (Deputy Director-General, UIDAI Technology Centre, Bengaluru), P M Saravanan (Assistant Director-General -- Operations, UIDAI Technology Centre, Bengaluru), Retd Col Shiv Gupta (Assistant Director-General, IT, UIDAI) and Vivek Raghavan (Chief Product Manager of UIDAI).

Despite repeated attempts, the UIDAI, IBM, and Dell did not respond to queries sent by DH, while Wipro declined to comment. On the other hand, HP-Enterprises said that it was committed to completing the project. Despite repeated attempts to reach out over email, WhatsApp and phone, Rao did not respond.

In 2019, the UIDAI -- a statutory body mandated to collect data on Aadhaar, had floated tenders for contracting 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. Wipro, IBM and Dell had raised objections to the participation of HPE in the project along with TCS (one more bidder in the project) as its system integrator.