Amended Public Procurement Act (PPA)
The new public procurement policy as adopted by the government will open the door for new entrepreneurs without any experience to participate in tenders and get work contracts.
Though the volume of procurement will not exceed Tk. 20 million, yet it needs to be borne in mind that when taken together such lower budget projects ultimately take up a huge chunk of the government fund.
Anyway, through this amendment, the government has in effect negated the meticulously crafted public purchase policy of 2006, which sought to meet three basic criteria such as assurance of timeliness, safeguard against corruption and quality of the work delivered.
We think with this cavalier attitude towards experience, the government, through its amended procurement policy, is but taking a big risk. For these criteria as envisaged in the 2006's PPA can be overlooked only at a huge cost to the government's image as well as to the public exchequer. We have also earlier experience as to how, in absence of a cast-iron procurement policy, the inexperienced suppliers had left a poor record of half-done works, corruption, pilferage and wastage of public fund.
It is, however, not being meant here that the new public procurement policy is totally devoid of merits. It has some merit in that it aims to infuse fresh blood in the trade and speed up work through procedural simplification.
But at the same time we have also instances of how in the past relatively less experienced contractors had teamed up with experienced ones, short of giving a blanket to novices.
Now the onus is squarely on the government to show that the new procurement policy works.
And we hope, the enthusiasm with which the government has amended the procurement policy would be demonstrated in equal measure while monitoring the performance of the recipients of work order. The new contractors should be made to understand what might be awaiting them, for example, getting blacklisted in case of default. Or in other words, the inexperienced entrepreneurs winning the jobs should be constantly under watch.
When all is said and done, we are rather willing to give the government a chance with the procurement policy as amended. However, it should simultaneously keep a provision here for reviewing the whole exercise in midstream and, as necessary, retune the policy in accordance with the exigencies of the circumstances.
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