KATHMANDU, SEP 17 -The government is all set to award the contract of the much-talk-about project on electronic driving licence to India’s Madras Security Printers.
A meeting of the Project Implementation Unit under the Department of Transport Management on Monday decided to call the Indian company for signing an agreement. Sources said the Indian company will be invited by Wednesday.
“Madras Security Printers has stood first among the three shortlisted firms after evaluation and marking of both technical and financial proposals,” said the source.
The hi-tech e-driving licence and blue book project had landed into controversy after it was revealed that Madras Security Printers was blacklisted in India for selling personal information to private companies.
The source added they received a “no objection” from the Prime Minister’s Office on Monday and from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) last week on awarding the contract to the Indian company. The ADB, under its ICT Development Project, has provided $2.3 million for this project to the department.
After media reports that the department was preparing to award the project to a firm having “controversial records”, a complaint was filed in the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA). The complaint had stated the Indian firm had been blacklisted in India for selling personal data collected for biometric identity card to private companies. Three firms—Madras Security Printers, Indra Sistemas SA of Spain and IRIS Corporation Berhad of Malaysia—had been shortlisted after the evaluation of technical proposals. In their financial proposals, Malaysian IRIS Corporation quoted the lowest $1.16 million, Madras Security $1.5 million, and Spani’s Indra Sistemas’ $2.1 million.
Even if the Malaysian company quoted the lowest, the Indian bidder stood number one in the evaluation of the proposals based on the Quality and Cost Based Selection (QCBS). Under the QCBS system, bidder bagging the highest score wins the contract. The financial proposal holds 20 percent weightage, and technical 80 percent, according to an official at the department.
After the agreement is signed, the bidder will get a 15-month time to install the hardware, develop the software, build the networks and train the staff to operate the system. The department has been working on the hi-tech machine readable electronic driving licence project for the last three years.
No comments:
Post a Comment