The Department of Immigration and Passports (DIP) is hurrying to collect 40 lakh Machine Readable Passport (MRP) booklets and 40 lakh plastic foils for lamination as the yearlong process has been scotched by Covid-19.
As the stocks of green books are on the wane, these products will be procured through Direct Purchase Method (DPM) which is followed in case of emergency buying. The total cost will be Tk 8.43 crore, an official of the DIP said.
The procurement proposal of MRP and lamination foils by the DIP under the Security Services Division will be placed in the meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs.
According to the proposal, an average demand for passports is 18,000 to 20,000 daily. It is necessary to have adequate MRP and associated lamination papers to meet the demand for one year.
At present, the MRP Personalization Centre has 1,12,000 applications pending for printing. Besides, three lakh applications have been submitted to various regional passport offices and Bangladesh missions which will need to be printed soon.
The warehouse of the passport office has an estimated stock of 10 lakh books with which it may be possible to meet the demand of merely a month. In this situation, the DIP has taken initiative to collect 40 lakh passport books and 40 lakh lamination foils through emergency direct purchase method.
According to sources, the DIP gave approval on November 13 last year for the purchase of 40 lakh MRP booklets and 40 lakh lamination foils. The DIP then called for international tenders on 21 November last year. The tender was published in daily newspapers and on the CPTU and the department's website.
According to sources, seven companies collected tender documents. Three companies from Malaysia, Indonesia and the United States submitted tenders. Then on 5 February 2020 the 1st meeting of the tender evaluation committee took some decisions including MRP verification.
Meanwhile, due to the long closure of the office for the pandemic and the fact that many of the staffers of the department were infected with Covid-19, DIP could not receive proper booklets and lamination foil test reports from the institutions concerned.
The technical sub-committee in its report recommended that all the three establishments be technically acceptable, despite the fact that the test reports of the three companies lacked several features in the sample submitted with the tender.
The samples submitted by the companies along with the tenders were tested at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Science Laboratory and Security Printing Corporation.
Eighty-four field tests of the products by BUET, Science Laboratory and Security Printing Corporation have been done, showing that in the sample passport are missing security features.
The validity period of the tender was 120 days from the submission date which ended on May 24. Due to the closure of the office for the global Covid-19 epidemic, it was not possible to issue a letter 10 days before the validity period expired to the three companies participated in the tender requesting extension of validity period as per PPR Rule-21 (2).
However, the tender is voidable as per PPR as it is mailed to the concerned bidders. Two companies extended the validity period but no response was received from the Indonesian company. Another organization issued a legal notice with objections to the validity of the extension. However, the tender evaluation committee recommended that further action be taken in accordance with Rule 34 of PPR as no proposal is admissible under Section 2 (d) of PPR 2006.
According to DIP source, it may take more than a year to get the passport booklets through the newly-opened international tender. The technical committee opined that the new supplier may need to modify the existing software and passport printing machine to deal with the financial and time constraints. In this situation, a proposal to purchase 40 lakh machine readable passport books and 40 lakh lamination foils through direct purchase method may be presented at the meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs.
ask/wi
