Swiss Challenge

9.11 SWISS CHALLENGE To achieve and maintain the targeted rate of growth, development of infrastructure is important. Bottleneck in infrastructure development has been mainly due to non-availability of adequate financial resources, appropriate technical know-how & administrative mechanism to undertake big projects. This calls for active participation from private sector. Swiss Challenge has come up as one of the innovative forms of public procurement, facilitating participation of private sector. Under this method, a public procurement entity receives unsolicited proposal for a public project or service; this proposal is made open by the procuring entity to other parties to match or exceed. In today’s perspective, there have been issues involved in Swiss Challenge method and some of them are as follows:- (a) Consideration of unsolicited offer from an original private proposer, if it has not been so invited; (b) having adequate appreciation of the original proposal vis-à-visactual requirements / public needs of the project; (c) the very scheme of receiving unsolicited proposal from one private agency may result in information asymmetries in the procurement process and absence of equal opportunities to all other parties making matching/ better proposals, leading, in turn, to lack of transparency, fair and equal treatment of potential proposers in the procurement process; (d) setting a reasonable time limit for completion of efficient bidding phase; (e) dealing with counter proposals from other parties, especially so when they offer specifications very much different from those included in the original proposal; (f) looking into reasonableness of the proposals ensuring that all the risks Vigilance Manual 2017 Chapter - IX Chief Technical Examiners’ Organisation 258 involved are duly taken care of and no undue benefit is extended to any of the proposers, at the cost of others; (g) suitable compensation to the original proposer, if any, for his original concept / intellectual property. Keeping in view all the issues, as listed above, a strong legal and regulatory framework to award projects under Swiss Challenge method needs to be in place, before this method of procurement is adopted.