An otherwise docile IT industry took to media to voice its concerns over award of technology tenders, which patiently gave it a hearing
Just last month in May, two of the technology biggies—HP and IBM – made it known that they were pulling out of the 20 billion outsourcing contract to manage the world’s biggest citizen identity database, Economic Times reported. Quoting an official of one of the tech majors, which walked out of the project, the same report said, “Things had become pretty hostile between us and the authority over the weeks.” Another top-level official was reported as saying that it had got pretty bad after they had complained.
Both HP and IBM had in April alleged that they were unfairly disqualified in the 2 billion storage solutions contract – billed as a precursor to the MSP contract, the largest of all the UIDAI project – which was eventually bagged by Wipro Technologies. Both the US tech majors had complained of the Authority being biased towards products of certain vendors (EMC and Cisco). In a letter addressed to UID Chairman Nandan Nilekani, ET’s earlier report said, HP complained that the Authority mandates only one OEM solution and all shortlisted bidders have to necessarily quote that only. “While it is an extremely risky and unfair proposition for a government project to be solely dependant on one OEM technology only, it also deprives the government from getting competitive rates,” HP is believed to have represented.
It may be easy to dismiss the ‘technology scam’ charges made by ‘disgruntled’ bidders as being slanted, but what is significant is that the authority postponed the bidding soon after the accusations were leveled, and made changes to the tender specifications. A quick recap of the chronology of events is in order here to explain the ‘what’ and ‘whys’:
3/12/2010: original pre-bid conference for supply, installation and commissioning of servers, storage and security systems postponed due to a large number of (over 1,300!) queries raised.
11/12/2010: At the rescheduled pre-bid conference UIDAI gives an assurance that specifications would be made open and generic and proprietary protocols would be done away with.
4/1/2011: first corrigendum – in all there were seven of these – mandates drastic changes in the storage specifications, resulting in only EMC qualifying. However those for networking remain unchanged making only Cisco eligible.
15/3/2011: UIDAI opens commercial bids for the project and Wipro emerges as the lowest bidder for providing solutions to data centres in New Delhi and Bangalore.
March last week: HP, IBM raised concerns over their technical disqualification in storage solutions contract.
8/4/2011: UIDAI puts off bids for the managed-service provider contract by a month.
16/5/2011: New deadline for submission of proposals. HP and IBM opt out; remaining five – Accenture, Wipro, TCS, HCL Infosystems and Mahindra Satyam – submit bids.
There is more. That as many as seven corrigenda were released to the storage solutions contract, say the detractors, points to the lack of technical knowledge of the designated officials. The Central Vigilance Commission, in consequence, came out with a circular on 11th February this year mandating an EOI-based tendering procedure for procurement of complex / technical solutions, wherein more than one iteration is required in the original tender document.
The CVC circular also goes so far as to suggest: “Care should be taken to make the specifications generic in nature so as to provide equitable opportunities to the prospective bidders.” It might well be directed at the allegation of bias in favour of technical solutions of EMC and Cisco.
However Nilekani has countered the allegation in an exclusive interview with ‘Inclusion’: “A huge amount of energy and time has been spent in creating an open technology platform which is adaptable to changes as technology develops.” Skeptics however are quick to point out that unlike MCA 21 project, which followed much the same methodology but kept the technology issue open, why is UIDAI insisting on a specific technology? It has also been alleged that the Authority was looking for solutions that were not just expensive but were in fact also something that were not needed right away.
Charges have flown in the past too. Last year, the Authority had shortlisted three consortia led by Accenture, Mahindra Satyam-Morpho and L1 to implement the core biometric identification system for the UID project. The mandate for the three vendors was to design, install and support a new system that will run a new applicant against every single entry in the existing biometric database to check for duplication. A source explains how the tendering hygiene had been sullied by the fact that two of the bidders – Morpho and L1 – have in fact now merged and become one entity even though the two were awarded the project separately.
Morpho, which is part of the French conglomerate Safran in the aerospace and defence space – officially announced last September that it had taken over L1 in an all-cash deal, becoming the industry’s most powerful player. The acquisition meant that in one fell swoop, L1’s high-tech security systems specializing in fingerprint iris, and face recognition for identifying individuals came Morpho’s way. Interestingly, the UID project got awarded in June last even as speculation was rife of L1’s impending buyout by Morpho.
In fact, a PIL challenging the entire tender process for Aadhaar was filed in a High Court division bench. However, the Authority dismissed it in January this year when the court considered the technical report submitted. To be fair, this is bound to happen in due course of anything with a “transformative” import. But had matters been laid threadbare in public domain, a lot of needless faultfinding could have been avoided.
Cost-effectiveness is one major issue in the ‘rigmarole’ that has got almost everyone’s goat. The cost of one Aadhaar enrollment roughly works out to 100 – 50 to enroll each individual and another 50 for the back-end expense. The entire cost of the project has never been shared by the Authority and if the figure quoted in a newsmagazine is correct, then the UID project is committed to spending billions of rupees. That’s without doubt a humongous number and we are still not sure of the total cost of ownership – establishing the infrastructure, its maintenance, cost for enrollment of residents, training and awareness campaigns and the cost involved in having to regularly update the central database. Apparently, one of the main reasons for the UK’s national ID project to be abandoned was its cost.
Is there really no more cost-effective means of transforming governance in the country? That’s a question worth billions of rupees being poured into Aadhaar. Knocking off some of that profligacy may be the entire base that’s really needed.
