Final call on airports bids today

GMR-Fraport may be asked to match the best financial bid.

The prolonged suspense over who gets the contract to modernise the Delhi and Mumbai airports may end tomorrow when the government is likely to open the financial part of bids that have cleared technical evaluation.

According to civil aviation ministry officials, the evaluation of the financial bids may well be completed and the successful ones identified tomorrow.

"We hope to finalise the successful bidders on Friday itself," said a civil aviation ministry official. That will help the government meet its deadline of January 31 for awarding the contracts.

An empowered group of ministers (EGoM), looking into the matter, has decided to give the GMR-Fraport consortium, the lone bidder cleared by the E Sreedharan-led group of technical experts, the option to choose between the Delhi and Mumbai airports. The EGoM took this decision on Tuesday.

"The government will try to get the best financial bid from GMR-Fraport to award it the airport it wants. The government is working out the modalities. One of the options is to ask the company to match the best financial bid that has been offered by other bidders," said an official.

The EGoM has also decided to lower the technical evaluation criteria to allow more players into financial bidding. As a result, the bids of GMR-Fraport, Reliance-ASA (Mexico), DS Construction-Munich Airport and GVK-South African Airport have qualified for financial evaluation.