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Mamuni Das

New Delhi, Oct 24 In about a year, goods valued at about Rs 9,000 crore could be procured by the Indian Railways through its online tendering and procurement system. This is because Railways is in the process of implementing the e-procurement process at 12 more places — seven zonal railways and five production units.

The decision to extend the e-procurement application into new units was based on a successful pilot project implemented at the Northern Railway.

The e-procurement process includes placing the tender documents and inviting bids online, allowing bids to be placed online in a secure transaction environment, and opening and awarding the bids online.

The software application for the pilot project at Northern Railway was done by Broadvision, an e-commerce software player. The seven new zonal Railways where the project would be rolled out are Western, Central, Southern, South Central, North Central, South East Central and West Central.

The production units are – Diesel Loco Works, Varanasi; Rail Coach Factory, Kapurthala; Integral Coach Factory, Perambur; Rail Wheel Factory, Bangalore and Diesel Loco Modernisation Works, Patiala.

The central data centre would be located at CRIS, IT arm of Indian Railways, which is required to handle the implementation.

In the first week of October, the software firm Broadvision and HCL (for providing the hardware) were awarded the tender to develop the e-procurement system for 12 units with an expanded scope.

The tender includes about Rs 5 crore for the hardware required for data centre, servers, communication equipment, uplinking services and annual maintenance contract.

On the software side, the work comprises of four stages – with value for each stage pegged at about Rs 70 lakh. This includes training, annual maintenance, online help and some system software. Moreover, CRIS would get some administration charges for the project. The first stage envisages a pilot project for all units, second stage includes placing a contract and tracking contract execution stages online, third stage includes setting up e-payment mechanism from both sides, and the fourth stage includes e-auction and global tendering.

The e-auction and global tendering are additional works to be tried in the new contract — which were not covered in the Northern Railway pilot project. Additionally, for each of the tender decision, Broadvision would get a nominal service charge.

“Including the Northern Railway, there would be 13 places where e-procurement would be in use in about a year. These 13 units make annual purchases valued at about Rs 12,000 crore. We plan to cover 75 per cent of these purchases (Rs 9,000 crore) through the e-procurement model by targeting the high value and safety item purchases,” official sources from the Railway Ministry told Business Line.

As a part of the pilot project, between November 2005 and October 22, 2007, the Northern Railway had handled 1,922 tenders online – out of which 559 tender processes have been completed, and about 536 tenders are under various stages of evaluation.

There were no responses for 725 tenders, most of which were uploaded during the first few months of the project when vendors were not familiarised, said official sources.

More Stories on : Railways | E-Governance | E-Commerce & E-Business

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