Now, e-procurement to have stricter guidelines ( 30 Jun 2011)

New Delhi:Kirtika Suneja; In order to enhance transparency and speed up the tendering process, the government has framed quality and security guidelines for e-procurement of bids, e-tendering, e-auction and e-purchasing, among others. Under the new framework, the basic requirements of any e-procurement system would be to achieve the goal of government procurement, standardisation of procurement processes and information entities in an efficient and transparent way. The e-procurement project, which is an integrated mission mode project (MMP) of the Department of Information Technology (DIT), has been implemented in five states since 2007 and more than 11,000 tenders worth more than R25,000 crore floated till date use this system. The system is built on digital signature and the major modules of this project are online enrolment, tender creation, tender publishing and award of contract. Under the draft guidelines, the procurement system must have templates to offer flexibility in the bidding methodology. Further, the system should have templates to adopt bidding methodology as may be prescribed by the purchaser. Besides having audit trail facilities or audit reports, the service provider providing e-procurement services will have to submit all the logs of transaction created by the e-procurement solution, including forensic image, on a quarterly basis. In fact, the new guidelines state that the e-procurement solution, including the computer server, should be installed in India. "No data as captured and stored in the e-procurement solution will be taken out of the country," state the new guidelines. "E-procurement involves litigation and if the server is located in India, then Indian laws can be applied to the process. Moreover, if the data reside here, then they are easier to retain and produce," said Gulshan Rai, director general, DIT's Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) Directorate. There are three operating models for e-procurement - dedicated e-procurement system, partial outsourcing and full outsourcing. In the dedicated e-procurement system, the government organisation wishing to undertake e-procurement owns and controls the system infrastructure and also controls all the procurement activities carried out. In partial outsourcing, the government organisation procures and owns the system, which is managed by a service provider with adequate security controls. In full outsourcing, the organisation uses the e-procurement system of a service provider which also owns and controls the infrastructure. Rai explained that the draft guidelines were a legal and safety measure and were expected to be finalised in two months once comments from all parties concerned were received.