AMID RIOTOUS PROTESTS from employees at airports across the country, the Union Cabinet has officially cleared the choice of successful bidders for the modernisation of the Mumbai and New Delhi airports. It would be stating the obvious that the process of arriving at the decision has been extremely tortuous with layer upon layer of official machinery going into the question of who among the competing bidders should be awarded the contract.

Consider the sequence of events: First there was the allegation of a conflict of interest for the consultants evaluating the technical credentials of the various bidders in that they were also executing assignments for one of them in the normal course of their professional work. This resulted in their work being reviewed by a government committee, which in any case came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of bias in the latter's work. But that didn't prevent the Government from setting up an empowered Group of Ministers (eGoM), which in turn wanted the cabinet secretary to review the whole process of technical evaluation. The cabinet secretary in the best bureaucratic tradition promptly outsourced it to another committee of technical experts that happily enough came to the conclusion that the work of the consultants evaluating the technical capabilities of bidders was not entirely above board. It left its imprint by tinkering with the consultants' marking.

The eGoM neither agreed with the latest technical evaluation nor rejected it. That all this has made a mockery of the concept of ministerial responsibility under the Cabinet system of governance that India has adopted is one aspect of the matter. But there is another and a more serious one: The administrative contortions that the Government went through has only heightened the suspicion that the whole process was prolonged to secure an outcome that was acceptable to the powers that be. There are lessons to be learnt from the episode. The concept of technically pre-qualifying bidders is a perfectly legitimately approach to weed out non-serious contenders. More so, when it is undertaken before financial bids are ascertained. While technical pre-qualification has its place in a tendering process, it cannot also be elevated to level that rational and objective grounds of decision-making guided solely by public interest, should be made a slave to it. It would have been in public interest to treat all those making the grade in a technical sense as equal and award the contract to the one offering the best financial terms to the Government.

In the instant case, between somebody scoring 85 marks on technical parameters and one securing only 80, a contract executed by the latter does not necessarily expose the project to a higher risk. In that sense the eGoM did right by taking into consideration the financial bids of an expanded list of bidders. It nevertheless failed to carry the process to its logical conclusion. In the process it laid itself open to the charge that that it was either attempting to favour some or seeking to eliminate some others.

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