More "struggle" in Indian procurement

Not long ago I had a post about the "struggle" to balance risks and rewards in India's highway procurement programs. The struggle, it seems, is more widespread than highway projects, as these two perhaps unrelated current stories suggest.

Procurement reforms in jeopardy after rift in govt panel

A government exercise to draft a comprehensive public procurement policy has run aground. In what is seen as a bid to guard own domain, five members, all of the rank of secretaries to government, in the 11-member committee are set to append notes of dissent to the report.

The opposition to change is principally from secretaries in ministries that are the big spenders, railways and defence.

Following Congress party president Sonia Gandhi’s speech at her party’s plenary session here last year, where she spoke about streamlining government procurement to prevent corruption, a committee of retired and serving bureaucrats, headed by Vinod Dhall, ex-head of the Competition Commission of India, was tasked with revamping policy and draft new legislation for public procurement.

The committee was to have studied model procurement laws and guidelines of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, the World Trade Organisation Agreement on Government Procurement and that of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, tailoring these to Indian conditions.

It was to have drafted a national law, unified regulations, a centralised e-procurement portal, a bid-challenge framework and training for officers. The panel’s mandate was to ensure transparency, competition, value for money, and the same treatment to foreign and Indian firms in procurement.

But most members felt there was no need, in their respective ministries, to change procurement rules.

After Raid, Indian Guru’s Protest Stirs a Firestorm

A sobbing but defiant Swami Ramdev vowed Sunday not to be intimidated by a police crackdown that dispersed thousands of followers massed for a hunger strike to protest corruption. He blamed the governing Congress Party for turning a peaceful protest into chaos.

The swami had focused his protest on the issue of “black money,” the untold billions of misappropriated dollars stashed in foreign banks.

Last week, ministers met with him several times to explain government initiatives on the issue as part of their effort to head off the hunger strike, and on Saturday he announced that the government had met his demands. But after the government announced publicly that there had been an agreement and that Swami Ramdev had promised to end the strike, he angrily vowed that the strike would go on.

The police raid quickly transformed what had been a quirky mixture of yoga sit-in and political protest into a political firestorm. Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., the country’s main opposition party, assailed the Congress Party as having mishandled the hunger strike and described the police action as “a shameful chapter in the democracy of this country.”

But Congress Party leaders were hardly apologetic and instead accused Swami Ramdev of trying to deliberately stir up trouble as a proxy for the Bharatiya Janata Party and right-wing Hindu groups. “You cannot allow people like Ramdev to run riot in the capital,” said Digvijay Singh, a powerful Congress Party leader who has been outspoken in his criticism of the swami. “He was trying to incite people. Therefore, the action of the police is justified.”