Rationality of threshold levels for tenderer's eligibility criteria in the standard tender documents under public procurement act-2006 (PPA-2006)

Abstract

In Bangladesh, procurement of goods, works and services using public fund is made following the Public Procurement Act-2006 (PPA-2006) and Public Procurement Rules- 2008 (PPR-2008). In this process a competent bidder is selected applying some predetermined qualification criteria through a free and fair tendering process. These qualification criteria are set in Standard Tender Documents (STD) issued by Central Procurement Technical Unit (CPTU) and the tendering process is restricted by the act of PPA-2006 and rule of PPR-2008. The selected bidder or the contractor completes the contract of goods, works and services as per agreement. In some cases, the contractors could not complete the contract as per agreement and in some cases they would complete the work with considerable delay and even the contract would be abandoned. In this project work, the qualifying criteria of the bidders and their threshold levels set in standard tender documents and tendering process of Bangladesh as well as in some of neighboring countries have been studied. In this regard, a survey was conducted over small to large sized construction firms about their technical and financial abilities. This survey work consists of eighteen numbers of construction firms whose technical and financial strength are studied. A contract of each firm has been studied in detail. These projects include successful, delayed and abandoned contracts. Detail information of these construction firms including the causes of success and failure of the said contracts in the light of threshold levels of qualifying criteria are presented in this thesis. Survey data of the above construction firms have been used to establish the relationship among the threshold levels of bidder’s qualification criteria with the success and failure of the construction projects. From the survey data, it was also attempted to find out the rationality of the threshold levels for tenderers’ eligibility criteria in the standard tender documents under public procurement Act.-2006 (PPA-2006). At the end of the thesist, comments and as well as some suggestions on rationality of the existing thresholds values have been made to overcome the problems facing during the tendering process in Bangladesh.