In a strong rebuff to the Anil Ambani-promoted Reliance Airport Developers Pvt Ltd, the Supreme Court today upheld a Delhi High Court order endorsing award of contracts for modernisation of Delhi and Mumbai airports to consortiums led by GMR Infrastructures Ltd and GVK Industries Ltd.

Dismissing the RAL appeal challenging the HC order, a bench of Justices Arijit Pasayat and S H Kapadia found that the Government decision was in keeping with the “larger public interest.”

The court referred to the situation where GMR had emerged as the only valid tenderer for both projects and said this “left no option with the Empowered Group of Ministers (EGOM) but to either vary the Request For Proposal (RFP) or to award one of the airports to GMR and to cancel the process for the second or cancel the entire process. The latter course would not have been in larger public interest. Therefore, the EGOM exercised its option. In the final analysis, what the EGOM had done is to accept the report of the Expert Committee subject to validation done by the Group of Eminent Technical Experts (GETE).”

Writing for the bench, Justice Pasayat also rebutted RAL’s arguments against GETE saying its constitution did not suffer from any infirmity. The two-member GETE, made up of Metro man E M Sreedharan and R Sivadasan of Indian Railways, was given shape by the Committee of Secretaries — which in turn was constituted by the EGOM — to recommend to the Committee on the overall validation of the evaluation process.

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