Delhi HC reserves verdict on airports upgrade row

The Delhi High Court today reserved its judgement on the airports privatisation row after hearing arguments of Reliance Airport Developers, the government and the two successful bidders "" GMR and GVK "" for about two months.

The Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Airport Developers had filed a petition on February 2 challenging the government's decision to award the Delhi and Mumbai airport modernisation projects to GMR-Fraport and GVK-ACS, respectively.

While concluding its arguments before a division bench of Justice TS Thakur and Justice BN Chaturvedi, the GMR today said Reliance's contention that GETE, headed by Delhi Metro Rail Corporation chief E Sreedharan, didn't consider the Inter-Ministerial Group's (IMG) observations was totally fallacious and baseless.

According to senior counsel PP Venugopal, appearing for GMR, GETE was required to ensure that the first Evaluation Committee (EC) strictly adhered to the criteria set out in the RFP during its evaluation.

"GETE didn't interfere with the marks allotted by the EC and had restricted only to issues where there was a departure from the RFP on an objective basis like development experience in non-OECD countries," he said.

The successful bidder said GETE could not examine 40,000 pages of bid documents as it was given only 14 days to submit its report. Such a task was physically impossible and went against Reliance's argument that GETE's mandate was to re-evaluate the bids.

Besides, the sub-factor for which marks were allotted to it was not only airport but also for other developments like three power plants and two road projects, GMR said, adding the scores were given on overall experience.

Further, the EC was entitled to take into account the Hyderabad airport, it added.

According to it, the RFP fully authorised Airport Authority of India (AAI) and the Union government to appoint any person/committee for evaluation of bids and there was no restriction to accept the Evaluation Committee's report.

Reliance Airport Developers counsel Mukul Rohtagi said GMR shouldn't have been given marks for Hyderabad project as the same was not yet complete. Besides, Reliance alleged that only AAI and its advisors were authorised to evaluate bids.