Sikdar a Bangla Bangaru?

AFTER writing about nothing but Afghanistan since September 11, I turn with some relief to a domestic issue which has been bothering me for some months. It concerns a multi-crore order (tender) for the public sector telecom firm MTNL’s Managed Leased Line Data Network (to take care of leased telephone lines for offices like the Express’), opened at the end of July last year. Three companies bid: French major Alcatel, and two public sector units with M/s Tellabs of the United States as their collaborator. Alcatel offered to set up the network at around half the price of the next bidder, namely ITI-Tellabs. So, after evaluating Alcatel’s technical qualifications, the chairman of MTNL ordered in September 2000 that Alcatel be given a Letter of Intent.

At about the time this decision was being taken, a member of Parliament wrote to the minister of communications enclosing a note, which he said was from the chairman of ITI, alleging that the Alcatel offer had some technical problems. However, when the ITI chief learnt of ‘his’ note, which the honourable MP had enclosed, he told the MTNL chief, in writing, that the note was a forgery. That, one would have imagined, would have been the end of that.

But, no, at this point enters Tapan Sikdar, minister of state for communications. Despite the ITI chief saying he had never said the Alcatel bid had technical problems, Sikdar’s private secretary sent for senior MTNL officials and ordered that Alcatel’s technical compliance be evaluated all over again. So, the government’s Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC) examined the Alcatel bid. It did point to some ambiguities — rectifiable through negotiations before the conversion of the letter of intent into a firm purchase order — but their overall assessment was that Alcatel had ‘‘complied all the clauses without specifying any deviation’’ and ‘‘complied all special conditions of the tender and the schedule of requirement’’ as well as ‘‘subsequent clarifications given by MTNL, unconditionally’’. (The dreadful English proves I have not made up the quotes!)
Sikdar, however, was still not satisfied. He insisted that
the Alcatel bid be once again evaluated technically within MTNL.

Meanwhile, the chairman- ship of MTNL had changed and the new chairman consented to do so. He set up a committee headed by MTNL’s Director (Finance). Curious. As the point at issue was technical not financial, the committee should have been headed by Director (Technical). But the technical director was sidelined. The committee pointed to certain ambiguities in the Alcatel offer and Sikdar seized the opportunity to secure the approval of the additional solicitor general to negotiate a price reduction with ITI-Tellabs, although the chief vigilance commissioner’s guidelines explicitly insist that no negotiations be held with anyone but the lowest bidder.

Negotiations with the second-lowest bidder did lead to a reduction in prices but only by about Rs 30 crore, leaving the ITI-Tellabs revised price of Rs 106 crore still some Rs 40 crore higher than Alcatel’s offer. The new chairman of MTNL, therefore, decided to reconfirm the decision taken by his predecessor and directed that Alcatel be given the purchase order, after taking into account what the technical committees had said.

This infuriated Sikdar who asked his additional private secretary to send for MTNL’s general manager (telecommunications). Two meetings were held on Gandhiji’s Martyrdom Day 2001, the first a one-on-one between the APS and the GM, the second at which two other persons were present, one a representative of Tellabs, and the other the managing director of a laminating and packaging company who had nothing to do with telecom beyond, it appears, a personal acquaintance with the minister of state. Please note that this meeting took place on the eve of a crucial assembly election in the minister’s home state. Sheer coincidence? Oh, yeah! However that may be, MTNL’s general manager stood his ground and refused to be browbeaten by the minister or his staff or his friends.

Bloodied but unbowed, Sikdar now had the matter referred to the Telecom Commission. There, the Member (Finance) recorded in writing his reasoned arguments for the minister to desist from interfering in the commercial transactions of this navaratna. And since Sikdar was considering issuing a presidential directive to get MTNL to do his bidding and award the contract to Tellabs, the Member Finance cautioned against this. The minister was, however, unstoppable. He vented his fury on the Member besides ordering an investigation into the alleged criminal collaboration between MTNL and the Telecom Commission, on the one hand, and Alcatel, on the other, for proposing to place the order upon Alcatel whose bid was at least Rs 40 crore lower than any other on offer.

Meanwhile, Alcatel made the mistake of pre-empting the outcome of the tussle by taking the issue to court. The MTNL Board was, therefore, convened on March 19, 2001. They decided unanimously to endorse the chairman’s decision to convert the letter of intent into a firm purchase order. Infuriated, Sikdar took this to his ministerial superior, Ram Vilas Paswan, who, in the manner of Pontius Pilate, washed his hands of the affair, saying the MTNL Board might meet again to take ‘‘an appropriate decision’’. It did, and instead of either reconfirming or rejecting its decision of the previous day, decided by a bare majority to seek the solicitor general’s advice on how to tackle the matter in court.

Unsurprisingly, the Delhi High Court held that if MTNL had technical doubts about the bid they were not obliged to convert the letter of intent into a purchase order. But did MTNL have any such technical doubts? None, or at any rate, none that was not rectifiable, it would appear from the record. The doubts were the minister’s, growing less out of his technical expertise, of which he has little or none, than his super-patriotism, which would entitle him to the hero’s role in any remake of the film Indian.

For good governance, clean and transparent, the question is whether ministers should lean on public sector navaratnas to take decisions against the grain of their own technical and financial judgement. That is the ‘impropriety leading perhaps to corruption’ with which I charged the minister in Parliament in the last session. And will pursue when Parliament reconvenes next week.

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