NEW DELHI: State-run telco Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has reportedly told the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) that the prices offered by domestic OEMs are “uncompetitive” and they are upto 89% higher as against the prices offered by global vendors.
The telco has alleged that domestic vendors have missed 25 of 35 floated tenders in the past, as per a report by Business Standard.
The development comes at a time when the Centre is pushing for local 4G gear procurement to allow a fair-play field for local vendors.
The telco had in July scrapped the Rs 8,000 crore tender for planning, engineering, supply, installation, testing, commissioning, and annual maintenance of the 4G mobile network it rolled out in March.
For the uninitiated, the bid by an unnamed domestic vendor for procurement, supply, installation, and commissioning, including operation and maintenance of optical transport networking (OTN) was approximately 83% higher than the lowest offer, the publication added, citing data from BSNL while the L1 bid from a global vendor was about Rs 273.97 crore as against Rs 516 crore from a domestic OEM.
On the supply side, BSNL has expressed apprehensions about the domestic OEMs’ capacity to produce equipment on a mass-scale and added that to gauge the efficiency of a product, at least five domestic vendors should participate in the tender.
The price quoted by domestic
OEMs will be an important criterion for assessing competition, as per
BSNL, and added that “sufficient competition” cannot be concluded if the
price difference is more than 20% against L1 rates.
Homegrown vendors such as Vihaan Networks, Sterlite Technologies, and Tejas Networks, led by the Delhi-based Telecom Equipment Promotion Council (Tepc) have sought their participation in the bidding process, ETTelecom had reported.
The telco is also expected to submit details about its upcoming 4G tender to the empowered technology group (ETG), headed by principal scientific advisor K Vijay Raghavan.
The ETG was set up to advise the government on its technology supplier and procurement strategy, to encourage both state and central government, to develop in-house expertise in policy and use aspects of emerging technologies and develop an indigenization roadmap for selected key technologies, etc.
BSNL, as a part of phase - IX network expansion, wanted to upgrade as many as 49,300 sites to 4G and the addition 7,000 new sites in two metropolitans- Delhi and Mumbai for Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL).
Homegrown vendors such as Vihaan Networks, Sterlite Technologies, and Tejas Networks, led by the Delhi-based Telecom Equipment Promotion Council (Tepc) have sought their participation in the bidding process, ETTelecom had reported.
The telco is also expected to submit details about its upcoming 4G tender to the empowered technology group (ETG), headed by principal scientific advisor K Vijay Raghavan.
The ETG was set up to advise the government on its technology supplier and procurement strategy, to encourage both state and central government, to develop in-house expertise in policy and use aspects of emerging technologies and develop an indigenization roadmap for selected key technologies, etc.
BSNL, as a part of phase - IX network expansion, wanted to upgrade as many as 49,300 sites to 4G and the addition 7,000 new sites in two metropolitans- Delhi and Mumbai for Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL).
