Bidders’ Competitiveness in Rural Road Projects in Nepal: A Case Study of World Bank Funded Project

Abstract

The comparative study on the trend of competitiveness among contractors before and after the introduction of e-bidding in public procurement in the Rural Transport Infrastructure sector in the local government institutions regarding the number of bids and cost trend of bids has been the core objective set for this research study. The case study of procurement process for civil works in rural roads undertaken by RAIDP in different districts is taken for research.

The bid data with Bid Evaluation Reports of 45 contracts of road projects before and after the launching of E-bidding was sampled for research. The study covers the procurement of road works in more than 15 districts comprise of both Terai and Hill out of 30 districts taken by project. The research revealed that bid participation in conventional paper based system was rather abnormal. The bid submission was only 26.84% of the bids purchased.  It was found that in one of the worst case, 107 bidders purchased the bids and only 4 bidders had submitted the bids in which only three bids were found to be responsive. The pattern of bid purchasing and submission in case of E-bidding is found to be more consistent. The bid submission was 90.57% of the bids purchased and the participation of electronic bid submission was 57% of the total. The researcher believes that the findings of this study are useful for reviewing the existing provision of public procurement system.