Bidadi plant bids not evaluated as per guidelines: L&T

The Rs 2,184-crore power plant project of the Karnataka Power Corporation Limited (KPCL) at Bidadi has landed in another controversy.

A letter dated December 21, 2012 to the Principal Secretary, Energy Department, by Larsen and Toubro (L&T), one of the shortlisted bidders, claims that KPCL has not evaluated the bids in line with existing guidelines.

In the letter, a copy of which is with Deccan Herald, L&T has said: “It is expected that KPCL will not deviate from the evaluation mechanism clearly spelt out in the tender, which does not provide for loading of the other bidders. However, we fear that once the prices as well as technical and commercial deviations of all bidders have been made public, KPCL is resorting to selective loading/granting of price advantage to other bidders on account of certain deviations in our bid.”

It says: “The KPCL is doing this, while ignoring the major deviations of one particular bidder (Alstom) in order to evaluate this particular bidder as L1 (lowest bidder), which we feel is a gross violation of the tendering process, specified in the tender.”

Energy Minister Shobha Karandlaje had told Deccan Herald last week that all the procedures were followed in selecting the bidder and that Alstom was the “lowest bidder.”

Apart from this, the company has said it also feared that the evaluation criteria given in the tender as per the specified Annexure-8 of Section A2 are not being adhered to in letter and spirit.

“We also fear that there are gross calculation errors in the working of the Tender Evaluation Plan (TEP) of one of the bidders, Alstom,” the letter said.

L&T, in view of the above points among others, had requested for KPCL’s verification and confirmation that a transparent process of tender evaluation was followed.

The letter to the principal secretary says that it was written after the company was not provided with the right responses from the authorities concerned in KPCL.

The company had written similar letters to KPCL on November 27 and December 10.
Further, in January 2013, the company filed a writ petition before the High Court of Karnataka and the first hearing was scheduled for Monday.