The Madras High Court is scheduled to deliver its judgment on Thursday on a batch of writ petitions that had challenged the State government’s decision to give up the practice of calling for State-wide tender and instead go in for zone-wise tender, by dividing the State into six zones, for procuring eggs required for the noon meal scheme.
Justice R. Mahadevan would deliver the verdict that was reserved after hearing marathon arguments advanced by a battery of senior counsel representing various firms, including those from other States, which had lost the chance to participate in the tender process since the value of each zone wise tender was below ₹50 crore.
It is mandatory to call for tenders from firms across the country if the value of the tender was above ₹50 crore. Though the value of eggs required for the entire State was around ₹260 crore, the government had broken it down to less than ₹50 crore by dividing the State into six zones and deciding to call for the tenders zone-wise.
Defending the government’s decision, Advocate General Vijay Narayan had argued that the State required approximately 47 lakh eggs every day and it was considered a very sensitive commodity since it was supplied to schoolchildren. The State-wide tender process was not found workable because only middlemen got to benefit out of it, he said.
“The suppliers in the State-wide tender process were not the actual producers. We wanted the actual producers in Tamil Nadu to benefit out of the tender. Therefore, we decided to go for zone-wise procurement of eggs,” he had said and asserted that the provisions of the Tamil Nadu Transparency in Tenders Rules of 2000 were followed scrupulously.
However, countering the arguments, senior counsel P.S. Raman, representing one of the petitioners, argued that the objective of procuring eggs for noon meal scheme was to feed schoolchildren and not to support local poultry farms. Therefore, the reasoning given by the State for calling zone-wise tender was not legally tenable, he contended.
