The bid was rejected on the grounds that the actual manufacturer was a Chinese company and Wipro did not meet the mandatory eligibility conditions for the Finance Ministry’s March tender.
The facts do “show the rejection of the technical bid of the petitioner (Wipro) in view of actual manufacture being a Chinese company and there being no certificate of registration furnished and further petitioner being not qualifying the mandatory eligibility requirement…, no interference of this court is warranted, a division Bench comprising justices Yogesh Khanna and Tushar Rao Gedelathe held, while rejecting the Wipro’s plea that an inadvertent error crept in due to shortage of time when name of actual manufacturing site was mentioned as GE Hangwei Medical Systems Co Ltd, China.
No manufacturer’s authorization was submitted by Wipro with its bid rather it submitted bid in its own name, the order stated, adding that the authorization was not even signed and was not as per standard form and the company ex facie did not meet mandatory eligible criteria and hence its technical bid was rejected.
In 2023, the Department of Expenditure Procurement Policy Division, Ministry of Finance, had issued an order stating any bidder that shared land borders with India was eligible to bid in any procurement if it was registered with a competent authority.
Citing various Supreme Court judgments, the judges said that the courts normally should not interfere in tender process as owner/ employer of project is the best judge of its requirement and interference should be only when it is in overwhelming public interest and not to make a legal point and instead parties be relegated to seek damages for alleged wrongful exclusionThe HC noted that the Wipro GE Healthcare’s document had shown that the manufacturer was GE Hangwei Medical Systems, a Chinese company. The certificate of conformity also showed that the Bengaluru site that Wipro GE Healthcare claimed was a manufacturing site of its wholly-owned subsidiary Wipro GE Medical Device Manufacturing, was in fact a manufacturing site of the Chinese firm, the high court said.
