Use of Rated Criteria to facilitate implementation of Government Policies to promote sustainability, innovation, and quality for Large Complex Projects
India is committed to Sustainable development goals of United nations and working towards climate change aggressively. Government has prepared National climate change policy with a vision of promoting ecologically sustainable development. In the context of India, to effectively address climate change, it is critical that especially for infrastructure projects, a paradigm shift in the thought process is needed right from the stage when project is conceived to implementation of the project. The procurement of works for the infrastructure projects carries lot of importance as it determines how project shall take into account sustainability and environment conservation during design build and
operation of the project.
Wastewater infrastructure has immense untapped potential to help India achieve its climate change goals. DBO modality for implementation of wastewater infrastructure is fairly standardised in India and primarily focusses on pre-qualification of the proposer based on their historical experience and thereafter selection based on the least cost basis. This procurement process, however, does not allow to evaluate proposer’s proposal on key points such as climate change, sustainability, quality,
innovation, risk management etc.
In India Government procurement system generally follows the General Finance Rules (GFR) 2022 issued by Department of Expenditure, Procurement manual 2019 (which provides framework of the Bid preparation and management) and CVC guidelines 2002 (which provides guidelines for formulating the eligibility criteria for the proposers). The manual broadly follows the principle of transparency, fairness, cost-effectiveness and accountability. General Financial Rules (GFRs) allow the government
entities to conduct procurement activities independently. While the basic principles of public procurement are respected, the system has resulted in diversity in the procurement system in the country. However, procurement of work is done with prequalification of the proposers on the pass/fail basis and only on a least cost basis after prequalification. Although General Finance rules 2022 allow the government department to consider QCBS based selection process for procurement of works, the
same has not ben adopted so far especially in the case of wastewater infrastructure.
Because of this, although the prevalent methods of selection of contractor achieve the objective of competitiveness and transparency, these do not take into account non-financial aspects such as quality, innovation, sustainability. Hence, the procurement system and framework need revision to take into account non-financial aspect while selecting the contractor so that client can get more value for money especially for complex and high value project.
The present case is the first of its kind procurement in India and takes into account financial as well as non-financial parameters of the contractor’s proposal for procurement works for one of the high value contracts in Ahmedabad using QCBS method (Rated Criteria).