Karnataka Sets E-governance Example

The Government of Karnataka’s (GOK) initiative in partnership with Hewlett-Packard (HP) to launch an e-Procurement platform for its various departments has met with increased adoption and popularity among the contractor community, making this one of the most successful PPP (Public Private Partnership) implementations in the country.

The GOK has derived many benefits from this plan including a dramatic reduction of the tender processing time from estimate preparation to tendering, for example, in the case of PWD – its Public Works, Ports and IWT Dept – a reduction of up to 40 percent on transaction time has been recorded. Other departments of the GOK, which have already implemented the above model, include the Sarvasiksha Abhigyan (SSA), the Karnataka Drug Logistics Warehousing Society (KDLWS), the Krishna Bhagya Jala Nigama Limited (KBJNL) and the Centre for e-Governance (CEG).

For the contractor community, specific benefits include the reconciliation of Earnest Money Deposit (EMD) and other payment related parameters by a remarkable 50-60 percent, as all payment transactions are now enabled online – thus, effectively, the return of EMD to contractors is now much quicker and simpler.

One of the leading benefits of the e-Procurement initiative has been the standardisation of public procurement practices across departments for works and goods procurement. The initiative has also led to greater transparency and is anticipated to give rise to healthy competition for all tenders, thus keeping final prices in check.

As part of the partnership, HP conducted extensive training for the contractor community (Works and Goods) as well as government users and individual department employees. The training covered both operational and behavioural aspects (related to change) and is expected to continue till such time as all the departments of the government are on board. It will be further supplemented by on-call support as and when required.