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The Rajasthan Transparency in Public Procurement (RTPP) Act 2012 providing the framework for strengthening the procurement regulations for the state government purchases has not been able to achieve desired results. The Act was enacted to regulate public procurement with the objective of ensuring transparency, fair and equitable treatment of bidding companies in government tenders, promoting competition, enhancing efficiency and economy and safeguarding the state’s finances. The state government after the enactment of the Act set up a state procurement facilitation cell (SPFC), but the cell does not have adequate staff and the capacity building efforts have been limited and the training has been imparted to about 700 officials, out of the 45,000 who deal with procurements in various departments.
The Act is meant for not only state governments, but also for the various boards, corporations state -funded bodies including the universities.
Chief minister Vasundhara Raje, who also holds the finance portfolio with a view to overhauling the revenue administration, has laid stress on strengthening the expenditure and revenue systems and a very large part of the $ 31 million World Bank loan would be spent on this component in strengthening revenue and expenditure systems through capacity building and improvements in IT.
The Raje government aims to revolutionalise the procurement process both quantitatively and qualitatively as thousands of crores are spent by the state government for procurement for various departments and the boards and corporations.
This would enable in building an efficient system that will be transparent and eventually lead to savings.
“The finance department after analysing the Act found that it has to address the gaps identified in implementation of the RTPP Act and its rules which will lead to enhanced improvement in efficiency and effectiveness in public procurement.It has been found that because of lack of trained staff the objectives of the Act could not be achieved.The stress now is to provide advisory support to SPFC in achieving its mandate by developing a set of standard bid and development of a procurement management information system,” said Ashutosh Bajpayee, joint secretary of the finance department.
He said the state government will now have a list of debarred and blacklisted bidders who indulged in unfair means as suppliers or contractors. And also developing framework and rules for registration of bidders, contract management and specific procurement methods.
There is an urgent need for a trained and skilled staff for quality procurement with a special stress on training needs analysis (TNA) and developing a strategy and modules for training.Such trained officials will have to be IT enabled and these officials after stringent training will be awarded certificates and the core group of officials after training in selected high spending departments will be accredited and only these officials will be entitled to do do the procurement. |
