Bengaluru: Upholding a new tender for solid waste management for Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) areas floated in Nov last year, the high court recently directed the state govt to redraw the timeline for the completion of the tender process with an outer limit of four months, if not earlier.
Justice M Nagaprasanna gave this direction while disposing of a batch of petitions filed in this regard. The petitioners —SWM contractors operating in several wards of the BBMP—are permitted to participate in the fresh tender.

The Bangalore Solid Waste Management Limited notified a request for proposal (RFP)/tender on Sept 28, 2022, for SWM in BBMP areas. It was challenged, and the validity was upheld, and the authorities were asked to proceed expeditiously. Thereafter, several contractors were blacklisted, or their tenders were not accepted on alleged frivolous grounds contrary to the Karnataka Transparency in Public Procurements Act-1999. These contractors approached the high court. During the pendency of the subject petitions, the Sept 2022 tender was withdrawn. The govt defended the withdrawal, contending that no right of any party was taken away, as no contract was awarded to anyone.
Subsequently, even as the petitions were still before the court, a fresh tender was floated on Nov 7, 2024.
Justice Nagaprasanna noted that after detailed deliberations and discussions, the state govt had decided to withdraw the Sept 2022 tender. “Therefore, cancellation of the tender cannot be held to be arbitrary, as is sought to be contended by the petitioners,” the judge added.
“As submitted by the advocate-general, every tenderer or contractor who is a party to the present petitions would be eligible to participate in the new tender. I find no reason to obliterate the new tender and permit the old tender to be taken to its logical conclusion, notwithstanding elaborate reasons rendered by the authorities for the recall of the tender,” the judge said.
On the plea to assess the reserve prices and prices quoted in the two tenders, the judge said all these would be in the jurisdiction of the Tender Inviting Authority. “This court, in the exercise of its jurisdiction under Article 226 of the Constitution, would not sit in the armchair of experts to assess the price bids that came about earlier or the reserve price. The only examination in the cases at hand was the tenability of the cancellation of the tender. I find that the cancellation of the tender is based on sound reasoning and does not suffer from palpable or demonstrable arbitrariness,” the court observed.