As a part of Vigilance Awareness Week 2012 a guest lecture on e-procurement was delivered by Mr. M. Manivannan, Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Centre (NIC), Chennai at Corporate Headquarters of DCI,recently.
Mr.S.Vasudeva Rao, IPS, Chief Vigilance Officer, has welcomed the gathering. Capt. D.K. Mohanty, CMD had presided.
Mr. Manivannan, in his address underlined the importance of transparency and fairness in public procurement processes in the country. The conventional manual tendering system has several drawbacks and given scope for allegations of corruption from several quarters. In order to prevent cost and time overruns in procurement and avoid scope for corruption, the Govt. of India has made e-procurement mandatory for all central organisations from Feb.2012 onwards.
In the first phase, all central organisations are required to publish tenders through central procurement portal and the entire chain of tendering process should be done by electronic means by the middle of next year.
Stressing the importance of proper integration of both e-procurement and manual tender procedures, Mr. Manivannan has stated that training of Govt. staff and vendors is essential for successful implementation of e-procurement. Organisations like NIC offer e-procurement solutions to public organisations and the same are compliant with cyber-law and directives of the central vigilance commission. The e-publishing of tenders has made considerable progress in the last few months with more than 70,000 e-tenders involving Rs. Two lakh crore having been put on the central procurement portal already.
Among the State Governments, the Odisha government has topped the list with publication of more than 37,000 tenders involving Rs.67,000 crore. Mr. Manivannan has also said that adequate security and back-up safeguards have been provided for proper implementation of e-procurement by public organisations.
Shri P.V.Ramanamurthy, Director (Finance) and Cmde. Jayapal, Director (Ops.&Tech.) were present. A large number of officers of DCI attended the meeting. The meeting concluded with vote of thanks by Dr.P.K.Sethi, DGM.
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Press Release, November 9, 2012