The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : E-procurement: State signs pact with HP

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Saturday, Dec 02, 2006
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

E-procurement: State signs pact with HP

Staff Reporter

BANGALORE: Karnataka will become the first State to adopt a common e-procurement platform that will facilitate online government procurement activities like publishing of tenders, online bidding, empanelment of suppliers and contractors, contract management, and other procedures.

The State Government on Friday signed an agreement with HP India to run the platform on a public-private partnership model to set up the unified e- procurement platform. In the pilot phase, the project will be implemented in six organisations where there is a high volume of procurement.

They are: the Karnataka Residential institutional Society of the Social Welfare Department; Karnataka State Highway Improvement Project (K-SHIP) of the Public Works Department; Krishna Bhagya Jala Nigam Ltd. of the Water Resources Department; KPTCL, Energy Department; Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) of the Education Department and Karnataka Drugs Logistics and Warehousing Society (KDLWS), Health and Family Welfare Department.

E-governance Secretary Rajeev Chawla said this would be the latest in the slew of e-governance initiatives like Bhoomi, Kaveri, Khajane, BangaloreOne, Nemmadi, Human Resources Management System, Computerisation of Commercial Taxes Department and the Regional Transport Offices.

Chief Secretary Malati Das, said, "the most common complaints against the Government are that there is no accessibility and transparency, but too much corruption. E-governance takes us a step closure to good governance."

The Government had already announced plans to set up rural cyber and business centres and as that begins to happen, e-governance would have to be accepted as part of the work culture, she pointed out.

Sophistication

Though Andhra Pradesh had put in place an e-procurement platform, the State's system is far more sophisticated and its USP is the scalability and wide range of applications, Dr. Das said.

P.B. Mahishi, Additional Chief Secretary and Development Commissioner, who is in charge of Public Works Department, said though the PWD had been using e-governance in some ways, it was time to become a part of the integrated e-procurement platform. Transparency in contract management, bidding and request-for-proposals (RFP) creation of a database of contractors, digitalisation of contract reports, and even attaching treasury transactions that would speed up payments, cut costs were a few of the benefits that make e-procurement a very attractive prospect, he said.

Additional Chief Secretary A.K. Aggarwal said e-procurement was the next step that Karnataka had taken towards transparency after it enacted the Transparency Act 2000 in the tender process.

Balu Doraiswamy, managing director, HP India Sales Pvt. Ltd, said, "e-procurement is in use only in a few developed countries, and in Karnataka, proven technology used in Japan has been translated for application to provide end-to-end solution." In the pilot phase, e-procurement system will be deployed on a test basis to handle live transactions, and the project will cover all departments, PSUs and other organisations of the Government in a phased manner.

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