Govt approves guidelines for e-procurement

The cabinet yesterday approved the electronic government procurement (e-GP) guidelines to demonstrate the government's commitment to achieving openness and accountability in procurement.
The government will kick off the e-GP system next month through 17 of its offices across the country under Local Government Engineering Department, Rural Electrification Board, Water Development Board and Roads and Highways Department.
The bidders are required to get registered with the Central Procurement Technical Unit (CPTU) of the planning ministry to take part in the bidding under the new system.
A CPTU official said authorities would invite the bidders formally through newspaper notices in next three to four days. The bidders can register themselves online.
The bidders will have to pay a fee of Tk 5,000 at the time of first registration. The registration will have to be renewed every year by paying a fee of Tk 2,000.
The official said the media personnel will be able to get registered for free to check up on transparency of the process and will have to submit their national ID cards and office ID cards electronically to sign up.
However, the media personnel will not have access to all procurement related documents such as evaluation report, the official said. He said the media personnel would have to ask for those documents separately under the Right to Information Act.
CPTU reserves the right to take the payment service of banks, payment service providers, mobile networks, and other reliable and authorised online service providers through memorandum of understanding (MoU) with agreements for the e-GP online payment network, according to the guidelines.
CPTU officials said they already had final discussions with Bangladesh Bank and 12 other commercial banks on the new system and a draft MoU has already been prepared. The agreement will be signed soon.
In the first phase of the e-GP system, the contractors have to go to a CPTU-approved bank to pay cash and demand drafts of pay orders to sign up for the system, CPTU said.
In the second phase, there are possibilities of opening various channels such as ATM, debit card, credit card or Internet banking.
Government agencies will have to prepare an annual procurement plan and will send it to CPTU. Then the procurement process will progress automatically.
A CPTU official said the system will eliminate bid rigging, obstruction and harassment of the bidders. “There will be no scope for political muscle flexing,” he said.
The e-GP system will be a single web-portal, through which procuring agencies and entities will perform their procurement related activities: publish annual procurement plans, invitation for tender and request for proposal.
Request for quotation, tender/application/proposals submission, opening, evaluation, contract award notices, payments, procurement management information system with key procurement performance indicator reports and other procurement related information will be available in the portal, according to the guidelines.
The e-GP system will be hosted in the e-GP data centre at CPTU, and the web-portal will be accessible to procuring agencies and entities on the web. The system will be implemented in all the procuring entities of the government.