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Informist, Thursday, Mar. 19, 2026

 

NEW DELHI – The Delhi High Court Thursday upheld the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Ltd.'s INR-27.68-billion tender for supply of recipe-based supplementary nutrition food items in Uttar Pradesh for 2026-27 (Apr-Mar) under Integrated Child Development Services scheme. It rejected petitions by Rasi Nutri Food India Pvt. Ltd., Kota Dal Mill and others contesting the eligibility criteria put up by the tender.

 

The petitioners had said that the tender's eligibility criteria mandating bidders to own a manufacturing unit in Uttar Pradesh was arbitrary and violative of Articles 14, 19(1)(g) and 21 of the Constitution of India and was contrary to public procurement norms. Further, the condition that there should not be any pending legal or criminal cases associated with take home ration supplies against the bidders amounted to penalising a bidder exercising its statutory and constitutional right to seek legal remedies and was contrary to settled principles that mere pendency of proceedings cannot be equated with culpability, said the petitioners.

 

The petitioners also questioned the tender's criteria that a bidder should have minimum annual turnover of INR 750 million from take home ration supplied for each year for the last three financial years. They said that the condition was arbitrary, irrational and has no nexus with the objective sought to be achieved.

 

The high court noted that according to NAFED and Uttar Pradesh government, the successful bidder would have to provide raw material like wheat and rice at a highly subsidised issue price on ex-godown basis, allocated by the Centre to the state. If an out-of-state bidder is permitted to transport thousands of metric tonnes of raw materials subsidised under the state government quota, process it and then transport the highly perishable finished food items for daily door step delivery to the state's anganwadis, then the same would be prone to pilferage, the court noted.

 

The shelf life of the food items were three months, therefore, it would be necessary to utilise the raw material, process it and transport the same to the respective anganwadis within the same time, said the court. In the eventuality, where the manufacturing facility is established outside the state, the time would be utilised simply in transportation of raw material, processing the raw materials and transporting the material back to the state, whereas when the manufacturing is within the state, the entire process can be supervised by NAFED, said the court. 

 

Regarding the criteria of pending legal cases, the high court said that the eligibility related to only those involving take home ration supplies. The justification is that, if a bidder has defaulted in the past activities of public importance, the respondents would not award any contract to such a bidder, said the court.

 

The rationale behind NAFED seeking annual turnover of INR 750 million for the three preceding years in supplying the take home ration supplies was to ensure that the bidder possesses the experience and the financial capacity to successfully carry out the tender, said the court. Hence, this stipulation cannot be said to be arbitrary or tailored in favor of certain suppliers of NAFED, said the court.  End

 

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Akul Nishant Akhoury

 

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