- (1.) The petitioner -Company (hereinafter the petitioner) seeks an appropriate writ, order or direction of this Court to the respondents to consider its bid for Establishment of Ground Control Network, Conducting Survey, Re -Survey and Updation of Survey and Settlement (Records) Operations (hereinafter the works) in Rajasthan in response to the E -bid Notice/Tender notice dated 07.01.2016. The intervention of the Court and directions as prayed for are sought on the ground that for reason of technical error at the end of the respondent's server (E -portal), the technical bid of the petitioner could not be uploaded before the bid closing time of 6:00 PM on 23.02.2016 and in the circumstances non -consideration of the petitioner's bid is wholly arbitrary, discriminatory and against the public interest of maximum participation in the bidding process.
(2.) The petitioner claims to be an experienced and established company in the field of GIS service and special data provider for creative solutions in the areas of natural resources management, land information systems, Urban Development & Planning and Geographical Information System applications. It has been submitted that the Chief Executive Officer, RBAAS & Settlement Commissioner, Rajasthan, Jaipur issued tender notice No.F -3(1)/Survey/Re -Survey/Tender/RBAAS/2014 -15/Part -II/547 dated 07.01.2016 and E -bid notice No.NIB -CEO RBAAS and SCR/Establishment GCN and Survey/Re -survey/2015 -16/2. Online bids were invited for the works described under E -Dharti (NLRMP) Programme from eligible bidders. The bid process included a single stage two envelope bid i.e. technical and financial bid, which were to be submitted online by 6 PM on 23.02.2016 and in hard copy form as well the following day by 11 AM only by those who had made their online bids. Having the requisite eligibility, the petitioner states to have paid bid fee of Rs.10,000/ -, bid processing fee of Rs.1,000/ - in the form of demand draft and submitted bid security of Rs.202 lakhs through bid guarantee No.4/2016 dated 22.02.2016 issued by Syndicate Bank, Shipra Suncity, Ghaziabad as the petitioner intended to participate for all the notified regions.
(3.) The case of the petitioner is that as a bidder, it exercised requisite prudence/diligence and visited the e -portal/website of the Government of Rajasthan relating to e -tendering prior to uploading it's bid documents in response to the E -bid notice dated 07.01.2016 . The concerned website specifically stated that there was no restriction on the size of the bid documents which could be uploaded into the notified E -portal/server identified by the respondent -Department. It was specifically provided under the Special Instructions to the Contractors/Bidders for the submission of online bids through the State Public Procurement Portal (hereinafter special instructions) that there was no limit on the size of the file uploaded at the server end. However, the upload limit was to be decided by the memory available at the client system as well as network bandwidth at the client side at that point of time. And prior to uploading the bid documents, the petitioner by way of abundant caution had successfully uploaded dummy documents of approximately 40 -45 MB file size on 23.01.2016 to ensure that if bid could be uploaded without any glitch. It was submitted that the financial bid, bank guarantee for EMD, bid fee and bid processing fee were successfully uploaded on the server of the respondents -Department. However in the course of attempting to upload the technical bid of about 100 MB file size, the server of the respondents -Department is alleged to have not accepted the bid documents instead indicating Java Heap Space Error. The petitioner as advised by the customer service of the notified website / E -portal was advised to reduce the file size to 70 MB but again was confronted with the same error as earlier displayed i.e. Java Heap Space Error. Thereafter the petitioner was further advised to reduce the file size to 20 MB. The petitioner in the circumstances had to re -work the arrangement of its documents to ensure that the size of the documents to be uploaded did not exceed the then recommended maximum size of 20 MB. This exercise however consumed substantial time and when after substantial efforts the technical bid was finally uploaded, before the freeze button, by which the bid could be submitted, could not be pressed, as it was 6:00 PM 23.02.2016 and the time for submission of bid had expired with the bid time out message indicated on the petitioner's computer screen. The case of the petitioner is that vide letter dated 23.02.2016 it sought to submit the hard copy of the bid with the respondents prior to 11 AM the following day but to no avail.;