By Telecom Lead Team:
Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) is set to place the telecom
equipment purchase order for 14.37 million lines by February end.
BSNL invited bids for 14.37 million lines in July 2011 under phase 7 of its
mobile network expansion in north, east and south zones. Only bidders having a
minimum turnover of Rs 8,000 crores in the last two years were allowed to
participate in the bid, according to a report by Economics Times.
“We are about to
finish technical evaluation. Once we are done, we will go for financial bids.
The purchase order will be issued by end of this month. All the major vendors
and known vendors have expressed their interest. We will come to know about
financial estimates only after financial bids are closed,” said R K
Upadhyay, CMD at BSNL.
The 14.37 million lines tender floated by BSNL involves planning, financing,
engineering, supply, installation, testing, commissioning and annual
maintenance.
In the month of
December last year telecom
equipment majors Ericsson, Nokia Siemens, Huawei, ZTE and Alcatel-Lucent
submitted bids for bagging the 14.37 million GSM line project of the state-run
BSNL for expansion of mobile services.
The government-run
BSNL had floated this tender on an e-tendering reverse auction basis in the
month of July.
However, there were
anticipations that 14.37 million GSM lines tender would be scrapped due to the
poor response from private vendors to the estimated Rs 5,000-6,000 crore
equipment supply contract.
The last tender was
finalized by the company under Phase 5 of its expansion in 2006 for 45 million
lines which was later reduced to 14 million lines in 2007, which was followed
by two more tenders for 93 million in 2008 and 5.5 million lines in 2010 but
both the tenders were later cancelled.
BSNL cancelled 93
million line tender worth Rs 35,000 crore floated in 2008 for all telecom
circles because of the controversies over the lack of competition in the bidding
process and complaints from various quarters that the capacity addition was too
high for the company.
According to a
statement given by Telecom Minister Milind Deora in Parliament, the
tender for procurement of 14.37 million GSM lines for expansion of 2G and 3G
services was floated by BSNL for requirement of all its telecom circles, except
Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
