No foul play in awarding tender to Alstom Transports: CMRL

CHENNAI: The Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL) has called the allegations made by State BJP president K Annamalai to be false and factually incorrect on Alstom Transports paying bribes to the DMK government for metro rail phase 1 construction in 2010.

The CMRL press note stated that allegation of Alstom Transports given undue advantage during the procurement of rolling stock in 2010 was baseless and claimed that the fair process followed, resulted in CMRL saving hundreds of crores to the public exchequer.

CMRL explained the tender process and stated that the bids were invited for procurement of 42 rolling stock (trains), each consisting of 4 cars (overall 168 cars).

The pre-qualification for this tender was called on September 9, 2009 and seven applicants applied for pre-qualification.

Off the lot, four bidders were pre-qualified based on given pre-qualification and criteria such as previous experience, financial capabilities, and manufacturing capabilities.

The four bidders were; Alstom Transport SA, France and Alstom Projects India Ltd, Bombardier Transportation Gmbh, Germany and Bombardier Transportation India, CAF Spain- Mitsubishi Consortium and BEML-Hyundai Rotem Consortium.

Subsequently, the bids were invited from the pre-qualified bidders on December 30 2009. And the last date for the submission of the tender was on June 7 2010.

Further, explaining the reason for issuing the addendum, CMRL stated that as the Union government issuing notice regarding deemed export was after it had already floated tenders, the tender conditions needed to be amended to confer this benefit to the project and bring down the costs.

Accordingly, an addendum was issued informing all the pre-qualified bidders of the availability of deemed exports benefits to the JICA projects.

Responding to the allegation that addendums were issued after the financial bid, CMRL press note said, "It is incorrect and both the addendums were issued a minimum of ten days before the last date of submission of tender. This made the bid fair, by placing all bidders on an equal pedestal and incentivised the bidders to manufacture locally."

For awarding the tender, the financial bid was opened on July 5, 2010.

However, due to other bidders being rejected due to failure in technical criteria and not showing the basic customs duty separately, the bid was awarded to Alstom Transport on August 2 2010.

And in managing to save crores, CMRL stated, "The addendum for conferring the deemed exports benefits resulted in reduced cost for CMRL. At the time of invitation of bids for trains for CMRL, cost of one stainless steel car was about Rs. 10 crores. Bangalore Metro had also awarded their bid at about Rs. 10 crores per car at that point in time. Due to the deemed exports benefits notification by the GoI, CMRL was able to procure the rolling Stock at about 8.57 crores per car. This has resulted in a savings of about Rs. 250 crores to CMRL."