New Delhi: Recently questioned to step down from the post of University Grants Fee (UGC) Secretary, IAS detective Raju Sharma is going out but not without starting a fire. Sharma alleges that this step was taken because he was against certain projects like the e-governance project, which has been given to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
UGC Chairman Sukhdeo Thorat’s brainchild, the project was awarded to TCS last month.
Starting with the haste in which the contract was awarded, UGC hired Haselfree Consultants on February 1, 2007 to prepare a Request for Proposal document to encourage bidders.
The document was ready by February 20. Though, contrary to do, the UGC place out advertisements inviting tenders on February 12 before the Request for Proposal document was ready.
Wipro and TCS were shortlisted for the project, but while Wipro’s bid was substantially lower, the contract went to TCS which says it was a honest fight.
All TCS Vice President, Tanmoy Chakrabarty had to say on the subject was: “May the best companionship win. There were no discrepancies. We just made a better bid.”
Wipro filed a complaint with the Central Vigilance Fee (CVC). The HRD Ministry too objected saying: “The proposal lacks essential details like scope of work, calculation details and proposed income.”
The CVC directed the UGC to answer within three months and when it did, the CVC picked holes in the answer saying: “Simply grading TCS as very excellent and Wipro as excellent (by the UGC) is without any convincing analysis.”
The UGC answered to CVC’s objections in January, 2008. This time, CVC passed the answers through, even though UGC had still not given any substantial explanation.
So why was the UGC in such a rush to go ahead with this, and how did all CVC’s objections disappear when the project was ultimately awarded to TCS a month ago?
None of the people who wrote letters of dissent to the UGC were ready to make any statements on the subject and If this is a step to place India on the global map as far as e-governance is concerned, then its surely a terrible initiation.