Tendering Update
A significant part of funds for toilet construction in Project Sammaan comes from the government. This entails following a transparent, and government-approved, selection process (a.k.a tendering) for the identification of contractors who will build the Project Sammaan toilets. The selection process should be legally tenable and will be subjected to public scrutiny. Any mishandling of this process will have serious implications on the project timelines and can put the entire project at standstill. Thus it is incumbent on Project Sammaan to ensure that the entire tendering process is handled with care.
Having understood the importance of tendering, the team brought in professional firms to handle the entire tendering process: Feedback Foundation handled the tendering for 27 public toilets in Bhubaneswar and Arkitechno will handle the tendering for 92 community toilets in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack.
The Project Sammaan team initially pushed for a ‘Quality and Cost Based System (QCBS)’ for tendering process. QCBS ensures that the contractors will be selected on quality and cost basis rather than merely on cost basis. This is an ideal tendering process for an innovative project like Sammaan. However, BMC officials insisted on an ‘L1 Tender” process, due to their existing auditing procedures. This implies that contractors are selected based only on the cost parameters. This means that whoever bids the lowest cost for construction based on the defined technical specifications will be selected.
Tendering for 27 Public Toilets
The tendering process kicked off with Anagram Architects submitting the required tender documents to the BMC. The tender documents include estimations, Bill of Quantities (BoQs), Mechanical-Electrical-Plumbing (MEP) drawings, and other details. The tender documents for each site were around 75 pages!
Along with this, Feedback Foundation prepared a “Request for Proposal” (RFP) document, which has all the necessary legal clauses for selecting the contractor for construction.
Upon submission, with the help of Feedback Foundation, BMC engineers reviewed all 27 tender documents and provided technical sanctioning for the them. This implies that all the technical details provided in the tender documents are in line with the government guidelines. The BMC then submitted the tender documents to the Standing Committee on Public Health. This is a group of select BMC corporators who approve all the sanitation and health related projects initiated by the BMC. Upon their approval, the tender was placed before the Corporation Council. This is the group of all the elected representatives in the BMC that needs to approve all the tenders passed by the municipal corporation. This entire approval process from technical sanctioning to the final approval took nearly a month.
As this is a tender with value more than 5 Million INR, it needs to be approved by the Principal Secretary, who is the head of Housing & Urban Development department, Government of Odisha. The BMC has sent the tender files to the Principal Secretary for administrative approval, which the project team is currently waiting for.
Once the administrative approval is obtained, BMC will release the tender through an e-tender process. It will be open for all the eligible parties for bidding for 21 days. After this, the contractor who quotes the lowest cost of construction for the specified technical details will be selected.
Key Challenges on Tendering
Multiple Levels of Time-consuming Approvals: Tendering is an elaborate 2-to-3 month process with multiple levels of approvals. Additional factors like election codes of conduct also impact the tender timelines. The tender release for 27 public toilets has been delayed for a month due to an ongoing election code of conduct in Bhubaneswar. This requires the CTRAN team to constantly liaise with the concerned officials and ensure that the approvals are obtained within the estimated timelines.
Stringent government Procedures: In tendering, the Project team needs to follow a rigid set of existing procedures, making it very tough to bring in new and innovative ideas into existing processes and formats. This meant that Anagram Architects and Feedback Foundation have had to put in extra efforts to ensure that all the innovations in the toilet facility design were captured in BMC approved-formats for the purpose of the tender.