The Indian Railways has disqualified the bid of a coalition of a Chinese company and an Indian firm for the manufacturing of 44 Vande Bharat trainsets costing nearly Rs 1,800 crore.
BHEL and Medha Servo Drives are the only two valid bids now.
Only three players had bid for this big contract including the CRRC-Pioneer Electric India, a joint venture between Beijing based CRRC Yongji Electric Ltd and India’s Pioneer Fil-Med Ltd, which has its plant in Haryana.
Medha, which had got the contract for the manufacturing for the first two such trains, has quoted the lowest bid, sources said.
It had become a major issue in the light of India-China face off on the Ladakh border. The tender was cancelled and the ministry had claimed that the decision was taken on technical ground.
Later the ministry had tweaked the tender conditions to make it an indigenous tender with stipulation of minimum local content of 75%.
Before applying for the train set procurement tender, the CRRC-Pioneer Electric India had applied for registration here after it was made mandatory for companies with beneficial ownership in countries sharing land borders with India to get registered for participating in public procurement contracts.
Interestingly, the railways had carried a series of probes into the role of its senior officials posted at ICF, Chennai who were involved in the manufacturing of the first two Vande Bharat trainsets.
They were accused of putting conditions that restricted the participation of bidders. “The number of bidders were more than compared to now and finally there are only two bidders,” said a railway ministry source.
