New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Thursday extended the stay on award of contract by state-owned BSNL for rolling out 45 million lines for GSM network till December 14.
A bench comprising acting Chief Justice M K Sharma and Justice Hima Kohli granted a week's time to Motorola to file its reply on the response filed by BSNL.
Additional Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium appeared on behalf of BSNL and sought early hearing, however, Motorola's Counsel said that they had received BSNL's rejoinder only yesterday and thus required some time to reply.
BSNL, which plans to expand its GSM network by 45 million lines, had disqualified Motorola from the bidding process on technical parameters – a decision that has been challenged by the US company.
BSNL in its reply had contended that Motorola was not eligible as it failed to satisfy the techno-commercial aspect of the tender.
Citing the evaluation report of the Committee for Evaluation of Tender (CET), comprising experts of the field, BSNL said, "The petitioner (Motorola) does not fulfill all the necessary techno-commercial standards prescribed by the tender document".
"It is submitted that the petitioner failed to even meet the eligibility criteria laid down in the tender document," it had said.
Motorola has shown its experience only for BSS component, which provides all the transmission and control functions necessary for radio coverage of service area, towards the supplies, installation and commissioning of 20 million network, the state-run telecom company said.
Whereas, it has not been able to establish the experience for the NSS component, which establishes calls between caller and called subscriber, for the 20 million network and has not submitted the user certificate for the offered core equipment of M/s Lucent Technologies, the partner of Motorola, the affidavit had said.
BSNL, submitted that instead of fulfilling the basic NSS component of eligibility condition of supplying/commissioning 20 million GSM network, Motorola provided a figure of 3.2 million, which does not meet the minimum requirement of 20 million.
The PSU telecom company had said that Motorola also failed on financial parameters. As per bidding conditions, a company must be a profit earning company in the last two years but Motorola did not meet this criterion too as it suffered a loss of almost Rs 37 crore in 2004-05.
Earlier last month, BSNL, had opened financial bids for the mega expansion of its GSM network to add about 45 million lines over a period of three years at an estimated cost of about Rs 20,000 crore.
Swedish company Ericsson had emerged the lowest bidder followed by Nokia of Finland.
Comments
0 comment