Ontrack pushes for e-tenders

E-bidding or electronic bidding is fast catching up in India. A portal that carried tenders "" tendertimes.com today announced that East Central Railways has adopted their electronic tendering platform and hosted tenders for electronic bidding for the first time in the eastern region.

The tendering platform was designed to comply with the regulations of India IT Act 2000 and the central ministry guidelines for e-tendering.

Officials from Ontrack Systems, the company that owns the portal, said that the company was working in this domain for the last four years and received various inputs from different government agencies and departments to develop this portal that allowed complete e-tendering.

"We must mention that the Indian Railways was extremely proactive in adapting the Internet as a platform for tendering. The newly created railways division in the East have also taken the initiative to interact and seek approval of the railway board to implement our platform on a trial basis for the East Central Railways.

The process of preparing tender notices, and documents and on-line submission of bids in the Internet is quite comprehensive and enables tendering authorities to leverage the power of the Internet to reach out to a large section of bidders at a very affordable cost.

Moreover there is tremendous savings in time and cost for government departments and public sector undertakings when they publish their tender notices on the Net.

Suparna Dasgupta Roy, head tendertimes.com said that the company also has the additional task of informing bidders about the electronic tendering process and educating them for most of the bidders for railways were not Net Savvy.

"E-tendering also makes the process transparent with chances of bid document being leaked out getting minimised and thus the secrecy of a bid remaining intact. The portal was designed in collaboration with Veri-Sign "" the international agency that provides encryption support, for money transfer over the net which is also used widely for credit card transaction and other monetary transaction over the Internet," explained officials from the company.