Glossary

The open route: the buyer advertises, and any firm meeting the qualification criteria may bid. GFR Rule 161(i) states that “invitation to tenders by advertisement should be used for procurement of goods of estimated value of Rs. 50 lakhs (Rupees Fifty Lakh) and above”. Rule 159(i) then requires the enquiry, its corrigenda and the details of the award to be published on the GeM-Central Public Procurement Portal, and Rule 160(i) requires the bids to be received through an e-procurement portal, so an advertised enquiry is an online one and the advertisement has a fixed home.

The Works Manual lists it among the attributes of pre-qualification criteria: “The bidder should possess the bidding capacity as calculated by the specified formula. The formula generally used is: Available bid capacity = A x M x N -B, where A = Maximum value of engineering (Civil/ Electrical/ Mechanical as relevant to work being procured) works executed in any one year during the last five years (updated at the current price level)”, with M a multiplier, N the contract period and B the value of works in hand. The manual's own limit applies: a criterion not specified in the tender cannot be used for evaluation or qualification, so the tender's qualification section governs.

The stage at which the tender ends and the contract begins. On the NIC portals it is the last module in the sequence: registration, publishing of the tender, bid submission, tender opening, technical evaluation, financial bid opening, financial evaluation and “Award of the Contract (AOC)”. GFR Rule 159(i) makes publication of the details of bid awards on the GeM-Central Public Procurement Portal mandatory for central ministries and departments, their attached and subordinate offices and autonomous or statutory bodies, so the award is a public record. The letter that carries it starts the winner's obligations, performance security among them.

Two acts on the same screen that do not undo each other. The GePNIC brochure records that bidders can resubmit the bid any number of times, and can also withdraw it. Withdrawal is the one that does not reverse: the guidelines for bid submission state that if a bidder withdraws an already submitted bid against a tender in the portal, the bidder will not be allowed to participate in the same tender once again. Both acts belong to the window that closes at the bid submission end date and time on the server clock.

Instead of parking money with the buyer, a bidder may be asked to sign. Rule 170(iii) lets a procuring entity require a bid securing declaration under which a bidder who withdraws or modifies its bid during validity, or who wins and then fails to sign the contract or furnish performance security by the stated deadline, “will be suspended for the period of time specified in the request for bids document from being eligible to submit Bids for contracts with the entity that invited the Bids”. A pandemic-era direction of 12 November 2020 made the declaration the only permitted form for tenders issued up to 31.12.2021; since then it is an option a buyer may choose.

Bid validity is how long an offer stays on the table. The tender states the period, and a bidder who walks away inside it forfeits the earnest money or falls foul of the bid securing declaration given in its place. Evaluation of a large tender rarely finishes inside the original window, so buyers ask for extensions, and a bidder may decline one. The works manual asks that the bid security stay valid for 45 days beyond the end of bid validity, which is why the expiry date on a bank guarantee matters as much as the amount written on it; Rule 170 governs the security itself.

The registration that lets a firm bid online at all. The guidelines for e-Procurement record that it requires the bidders to enrol on the CPP Portal using a valid Digital Signature Certificate and a valid email address. A public-sector notice inviting tender puts the cost plainly: “Enrolment on the CPP Portal is free of charge.” One enrolment serves every tender published on that instance, and a state or public-sector portal built on the same software carries an enrolment of its own. The certificate, not the enrolment, is what a bidder pays for.

The bill of quantities is where a bid becomes a price. The buyer publishes it with the tender document, listing each item, its unit and the quantity required; the bidder enters rates against them and the sheet totals itself into the figure read out at financial opening. On the central portal it is an uploaded spreadsheet in a fixed structure, and the bidders' manual kit carries separate preparation guides for its percentage-rate, item-rate and item-wise forms. It is the one document in a bid where an arithmetic slip and a commercial decision look exactly alike from the outside.

The portal at eprocure.gov.in, whose footer records that it is “designed, hosted and maintained by National Informatics Centre (NIC), in association with Procurement Policy Division, Dept. of Expenditure, Ministry of Finance”. GFR Rule 159(i) makes it mandatory for every ministry and department of the Central Government, their attached and subordinate offices and autonomous or statutory bodies to publish tender enquiries, corrigenda and details of bid awards on the GeM-Central Public Procurement Portal, and Rule 160(i) requires bids to be received through e-procurement portals. Its own eProcurement system lets a tenderer download the tender schedule free of cost and submit the bid online.

The order defines the class by the offer, not by where the company is registered: “a supplier or service provider, whose goods, services or works offered for procurement, has local content equal to or more than 50%”, the nodal ministry for an item being free to prescribe another percentage. Class-I is eligible for every central tender, including one a nodal ministry has restricted, and is the class the order names when the lowest bidder is invited to match a price under the purchase preference. Above ₹10 crore the manuals reproduce the order's requirement of a certificate giving the percentage of local content.

The order's words are “a supplier or service provider, whose goods, services or works offered for procurement, has local content more than 20% but less than 50%”; at or below 20% the offer is a non-local one. Where the estimated value of purchases is less than ₹200 crore and a global tender enquiry has not been approved, both Class-I and Class-II local suppliers are eligible to bid. The order is equally plain about the limit of the status: a “Class-II local supplier” will not get purchase preference, and a nodal ministry may restrict a tender to Class-I.

A corrigendum is how a live tender changes. The works manual allows the procuring entity, at its own initiative or in answer to a query, to amend the bid documents at any time before the submission date by issuing one, and to extend the deadline where the change is significant. The model tender document is blunt about its standing: corrigenda and addenda “shall be published in the same manner as the original Tender Document”, the bidder's own responsibility is to check the website for them, and any so issued “shall be considered a part of the Tender Document”. A bid answering the original text is answering a document that no longer exists.

A cover is an envelope that has become a file. Paper tendering asked for sealed envelopes; the portal asks for uploads, and keeps the word. The tender states the count in its summary sheet (the model tender document prints it as “No. of Covers [Two Covers]”), and the count tells a bidder how the bid will be opened and in what order. The central portal's bidders' manual kit carries separate submission guides for single, two, three and four cover tenders, because the screens differ. What belongs in each cover is stated in the tender and nowhere else.

GFR Rule 151, as amended on 8 May 2026, makes a bidder liable to debarment on conviction under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for loss of life or property or a threat to public health, or under the four labour codes; and where a firm has been debarred more than once for failing to pay wages or remit social-security contributions. A bar across all procuring entities follows a decision of the Department of Expenditure and runs for not more than three years; a single entity may bar a firm from its own procurement for not more than two years. Breach of a bid securing declaration is a violation of the Code on Integrity.

A works contract is not finished when the work is handed over. For a stated period afterwards the contractor remains answerable for defects that appear and must make them good at its own cost; the contract conditions name the period and what counts as a defect. It matters to the money as well as to the work, because the security has to outlive it: the works manual requires performance security to remain valid “for a period of 60 (sixty) days beyond the date of completion of all contractual obligations of the contractor, including Defect Liability Period (DLP)”. Retention money is usually released against the same milestone.

What a bidder signs and encrypts a bid with. The Central Public Procurement Portal states that a DSC of Class 3 category issued by a licensed Certifying Authority is needed for e-filing on the eTendering portal, and that Class 3 is the level at which the applicant presents himself or herself before a Registration Authority. The bid-submission guidelines ask bidders to procure and keep ready, well in advance, a valid signing certificate of Class III issued by a Certifying Authority under the Controller. The Controller of Certifying Authorities publishes the list of licensed authorities and the classes of certificate, including the hardware requirement.

A firm recognised as a start-up by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade. The Works Manual records that the condition of prior turnover and prior experience may be relaxed for such start-ups, subject to their meeting quality and technical specifications and to suitable provision in the tender document, and that the relaxation “is not optional, but has to be ensured”, except for items related to public safety. The recognition is read with the exemptions GFR Rule 170 carries on bid security, which the Department of Expenditure's memorandum of 12 November 2020 also set out.

Two different things on the same portal. Under e-Procurement the complete tendering, including the submission of bids by the bidders, is online, and bidders must enrol on the portal with a valid Digital Signature Certificate and a valid email address; under e-Publishing the user organisations continue to invite bids in paper-based format. The guidelines of 7 June 2019 record the mandate on all central ministries and departments, their attached and subordinate offices, central public sector enterprises and autonomous or statutory bodies to commence e-Procurement for procurements with an estimated value of ₹2 lakh or above with effect from 1 April 2016. The ePublishing system carries tender enquiries, corrigenda and award-of-contract details.

Earnest money is the deposit furnished with a bid so that the offer cannot be abandoned once the prices are known. Rule 170(i) puts the amount ordinarily between 2 and 5 per cent of the estimated value of the goods being procured, and allows it as an insurance surety bond, an account payee demand draft, a fixed deposit receipt, a banker's cheque, a bank guarantee including an electronic one, or an online payment. It is forfeited on withdrawal during validity or on refusal to sign, and Rule 171(iii) returns it to the winner once performance security is received. Unsuccessful bidders get theirs back after the validity period expires.

An office memorandum of 05.08.2022 inserted the words “including e-Bank Guarantee” into the rules governing bid security and performance security, so a guarantee issued and verified electronically is accepted without a stamped paper original travelling between a bank branch and a buyer's office. Adoption followed on the buyer side: the National Highways Authority of India announced on 2 November 2022 that it had started accepting electronic bank guarantees and had digitised its existing ones. The instrument is otherwise an ordinary guarantee: the same issuing bank, the same wording, the same expiry to watch.

The estimated value is what the buyer expects the contract to cost, arrived at before the tender is issued and printed in the notice. It is not a ceiling on what may be quoted, but a good deal follows from it: bid security under Rule 170(i) is a percentage of it, and Rule 161(i) fixes the value at or above which goods must be tendered by open advertisement rather than bought by a narrower route. A bidder reads it twice: once as the size of the job, and once as the base on which the earnest money the tender asks for was calculated.

An expression of interest is a shortlisting stage, not an award stage. The consultancy manual describes it as “an openly advertised competitive … shortlisting process called Expression of Interest, giving equal opportunity to all interested bidders to be considered for shortlisting”, with the request for expression of interest advertised on the Central Public Procurement Portal and on the Government e Marketplace. A firm answers it with capability, similar assignments and team strength rather than a price. Public sector buyers publish these beside their ordinary tender notices; BHEL's tender page carries expressions of interest alongside notifications and corrigenda.

The financial bid is the price and nothing else: the filled bill of quantities or price schedule, the taxes and duties as the tender asks them to be shown, and the financial details that go with them. In a two-cover tender it is uploaded at the same time as the technical bid but decrypted much later, on a date announced after technical evaluation. The goods manual states the consequence of failing that evaluation plainly: “in e-procurement, financial bids of technically non-compliant offers would remain encrypted and unopened”. The price a rejected bidder quoted is therefore never known to anyone.

Fixed budget selection turns the usual question round. Instead of asking what an assignment will cost, the buyer states the money available in the request for proposal and asks consultants what they will deliver for it. Proposals are then judged on technical quality, and the best one that stays inside the stated budget is selected. The consultancy manual lists it as one of the four selection methods, alongside least cost selection, quality and cost based selection and single source selection. It suits work whose scope can be trimmed to fit (studies, surveys and reports) rather than work whose scope is fixed by the outcome required.

The last click of a submission. The portal's help for contractors states that the bidder has to click on the Freeze Bid button to complete the bid submission process, and that “Bids Which are not Frozen are considered as Incomplete/Invalid bids”. The clock that decides is the server system clock, in Indian Standard Time, and offline documents are not handled through the system. Where a tender fee or bid security is paid online, only on successful receipt of that payment can the bid be frozen and the acknowledgment issued.

Rule 149 sets the route by value. Up to ₹50,000 a buyer may purchase through any of the available suppliers on GeM meeting the requisite quality, specification and delivery period; above ₹50,000 and up to ₹10,00,000 through the GeM seller having the lowest price amongst the available sellers of at least three different manufacturers. Above that ceiling the purchase is from the supplier having the lowest price meeting the requisite quality, specification and delivery period “after mandatorily obtaining bids, using online bidding or reverse auction tool provided on GeM”. The slabs read as amended on 10.07.2024, and automobiles are excepted from the first ceiling.

The financial rules every central ministry, department, attached and subordinate office and autonomous body buys under. The Goods Manual states it in terms: “In the Central Government, there is no law exclusively governing public procurement. However, comprehensive Rules and Regulations in this regard are available in the General Financial Rules (GFR), 2017 (especially chapters 6 to 9).”Department of Expenditure, Ministry of FinanceRules 142 to 176 are the rules for the procurement of goods. Rule 206 confines them: where a circumstance is not covered by Rules 198 to 205, a buyer of non-consulting services may refer to Rules 142 to 176 and not to the rules for consulting services.

The software the Government of India instance on the central portal runs on, and so do the defence, public-sector and state instances. Its modules run from enrolment of government officials and bidders through tender creation and publishing, publication of corrigenda and pre-bid meeting documents, single or multiple cover bid systems, live bid opening for bidders, technical evaluation, financial bid opening and evaluation, to Award of the Contract. The training portal describes the system as generic in nature and adaptable to goods, services and works alike. A bidder who has learnt one instance has learnt the screens of the others.

A tender enquiry that foreign bidders may answer. The Make in India order's para 3(b) reads with GFR Rule 161(iv): with an estimated value of purchases less than ₹200 crore a global tender enquiry shall not be issued except with the approval of the competent authority as designated by the Department of Expenditure, and only a Class-I or a Class-II local supplier is then eligible to bid. Which class an offer falls in is decided by its local content, and the nodal ministry for an item may prescribe the percentage that applies.

The marketplace at gem.gov.in, run by GeM SPV, a Section 8 company under the Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, for online procurement of common-use goods and services. GFR Rule 149 states that the procurement of goods and services by ministries or departments “will be mandatory for Goods or Services available on GeM”, and the same rule sets the routes by value. GeM's own page records that purchases through it by government users were authorised and made mandatory by the Ministry of Finance by adding Rule 149 to the General Financial Rules, 2017.

A surety bond is a promise from an insurer rather than from a bank. An office memorandum of 02.02.2022 amended the rules so that an insurance surety bond is accepted alongside a demand draft, fixed deposit receipt, banker's cheque and bank guarantee, for bid security and for performance security alike. Rule 170(i) as amended now names it first in the list of acceptable instruments. For a contractor the attraction is that it does not consume banking limits the way a guarantee does; whether a particular tender will take one is still a matter for the tender document.

L1 is the bidder left with the lowest evaluated price once the technically non-responsive bids have been set aside. Evaluated, not quoted: loading for taxes, freight, deviations and anything else the tender says will be added is done before the ranking, so the lowest figure typed into a sheet is not always L1. Nor is L1 automatically the winner: a purchase preference band can let another bidder come down to that price and take a share of the tender. What the position does carry is the exclusive right to be negotiated with, and even that only in exceptional circumstances, because Rule 173(xiv) says negotiation after bid opening “must be severely discouraged”.

Least cost selection is one of the four methods the consultancy manual names, beside quality and cost based selection, fixed budget selection and single source selection. It works in two moves: a minimum qualifying mark for technical quality is set in advance as a benchmark, normally 75 out of a maximum of 100, and every proposal at or above it is then compared on price, with the cheapest selected. Quality above the benchmark earns nothing extra, which is why the manual's own weighting table points to this method for assignments of a standard or routine nature rather than for complex ones.

The goods manual defines it in one sentence: “Compensation of loss on account of late delivery (actually incurred as well as notional) where loss is pre-estimated and mutually agreed to is termed as Liquidated Damages (LD). The law allows recovery of pre-estimated loss provided such a term is included in the contract, and there is no need to establish actual loss due to late supply.”Department of Expenditure, Ministry of FinanceTwo consequences for a bidder. The clause has to be in the contract before it can bite, so it sits in the conditions published with the tender. And once it is, the buyer deducts from the running or final bill without having to prove what the delay cost.

The revision of 28 May 2018 defines it as “the amount of value added in India which shall, unless otherwise prescribed by the Nodal Ministry, be the total value of the item procured (excluding net domestic indirect taxes) minus the value of imported content in the item (including all customs duties) as a proportion of the total value, in percent”. The release on the 2017 order records that the minimum local content shall ordinarily be 50%, and that a nodal ministry may prescribe a higher or lower percentage for an item and the manner of its calculation. The percentage is what places an offer in Class-I or Class-II.

The revision of 28 May 2018 defines it as “the maximum extent to which the price quoted by a local supplier may be above the L 1 for the purpose of purchase preference”, and the release on the 2017 order records that the margin shall be 20%. The order then works it: if L1 is a Class-I local supplier the contract is awarded to L1; otherwise half the order quantity is awarded to L1 and the lowest bidder among the Class-I local suppliers is invited to match the L1 price for the rest, provided its quoted price falls within the margin.

The class of enterprise the Public Procurement Policy for MSEs, Order 2012 benefits, and the registration by which a bidder shows a buyer that it belongs there. The FAQ records what the status earns (tender sets free of cost and exemption from payment of earnest money deposit) and states as plainly what it does not: exemption from a performance bank guarantee or security deposit is not covered by the policy, and traders, distributors, sole agents and works contracts are outside its purview. On GeM the registration sits alongside the seller's own permanent account number, bank account and billing details.

The FAQ states that participating micro and small enterprises quoting a price within the band of L1 plus 15 per cent shall be allowed to supply a portion of the requirement by bringing their price down to the L1 price where L1 is someone other than a micro or small enterprise, and that such an enterprise shall be allowed to supply up to 25 per cent of the total tender value. The Goods Manual adds the arithmetic that decides the band: where the buyer negotiates with the non-MSE L1, it is computed on the original L1 price and not on the lower negotiated one.

The Government of India's information-technology body, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The Central Public Procurement Portal's own footer records that it is “designed, hosted and maintained by National Informatics Centre (NIC), in association with Procurement Policy Division, Dept. of Expenditure, Ministry of Finance”. The same body publishes the GePNIC e-procurement software, whose modules (enrolment, publishing, bid submission, tender opening, evaluation and award of contract) are what a bidder meets on the central, public-sector and state instances alike. Its training portal calls the system generic and adaptable to goods, services and works.

The notice inviting tender is the first sheet a bidder reads, and the one that decides whether the rest is worth reading. It names the procuring entity, describes the goods or the work, states the estimated value and the period of the contract, sets out the tender fee and the earnest money if either is asked for, and fixes the dates for downloading, for queries, for submission and for opening. In the model tender document the central government publishes, the notice is followed at once by a Tender Information Summary that states the number of covers a bid must be made in. Everything it promises is expanded in the tender document behind it.

Earnest money guards the offer; performance security guards the contract. Rule 171(i) sets it at 3 to 5 per cent of contract value for goods, consultancy services and non-consultancy services, while for works the performance security together with security deposit or retention money remains at 3 to 10 per cent. It may be furnished as an insurance surety bond, demand draft, fixed deposit receipt, bank guarantee including an electronic one, or an online payment. Rule 171(ii) requires it to stay valid for 60 days beyond completion of all contractual obligations including warranty, and the bid security is released once it has been received.

The rule is short. Rule 173(xiv): “Negotiation with bidders after bid opening must be severely discouraged.” The goods manual repeats it and states the one exception, that where negotiation is necessary due to unavoidable circumstances “it should be held only with the lowest acceptable bidder (L1)”, and then closes the obvious door: “in no case, including where cartel rates are suspected, should negotiations be extended to those who had either not tendered originally or whose bid was rejected.”Department of Expenditure, Ministry of FinanceFor a bidder this means the price submitted is, in the ordinary course, the price that will be judged.

Where equipment is sophisticated or a contract is turnkey, the tender provides for one or more rounds of pre-bid conference under Rule 173(x). Bidders send written queries; the buyer answers them at the meeting. The goods manual asks that the date be set “normally after 15 to 21 days of the issue of the Tender Document” and stated in the document itself. What is said there binds nobody: the works manual is explicit that requirements are revised only “by way of issue of a formal corrigendum” and that minutes of the meeting will not suffice, with at least two clear weeks left for bidding afterwards. Rule 173(x) is the authority.

Where a work is large or technically demanding, the buyer qualifies the field before it prices it. A pre-qualification notice asks for experience of similar work, plant, financial standing and personnel, and only the firms that clear it receive the tender that carries prices. It saves the buyer from evaluating offers from firms that could not perform, and it saves a firm from pricing a job it was never going to be allowed to take. Public sector portals treat these as a category of their own: NTPC's tender site publishes “Notices Inviting Tenders (NITs) and pre-qualification tenders” together, searchable and downloadable.

The manuals' word for the buyer: the ministry, department, attached office, autonomous body or public-sector undertaking that decides what to buy, issues the tender, evaluates the bids and signs the contract. The Goods Manual uses the term throughout: a procuring entity may fix a bare minimum cost of tender documents in exceptional cases, and negotiation after bid opening, where it happens at all, is held only with the lowest acceptable bidder. The Model Tender Document addresses its notes to the procuring entity and its instructions to bidders, which is how a reader tells whose obligation a clause is.

Made under section 11 of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Act, 2006. The Development Commissioner's FAQ records that a minimum 25 per cent share of the total annual procurement by central ministries, departments and public sector undertakings is to be made from micro and small enterprises, and that the policy applied from 1.4.2012 and became mandatory from 1.4.2015. The amendment of 9 November 2018 substituted “25 per cent” for “20 per cent” wherever it occurred and earmarked 3 per cent for enterprises owned by women. Sambandh records 4 per cent reserved within that target for enterprises owned by Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

Under quality and cost based selection a technical score and a financial score are combined in weights the request for proposal states in advance, and the highest combined score wins. The consultancy manual's Table 1 offers weightings and calls them “suggestive”: 80 per cent on quality for highly complex assignments with downstream consequences, and a band of 75 to 65 per cent on quality for the majority of cases. So the split has to be read out of the tender rather than assumed. Rule 192 is the authority for the method, and a technical benchmark below which no financial proposal is opened applies here too.

The Goods Manual defines it as “an agreement between the purchaser and the Supplier for the supply of specified goods (and allied services, if any) at a set price and terms & conditions … during the period covered by the Rate Contract”, in which “no quantity is mentioned, nor is any minimum drawable quantity guaranteed”, a standing offer from the supplier firm. Buyers draw on it by placing supply orders. The performance security such an order carries is the one GFR Rule 171(i) sets, in the form the amendment of 1 January 2024 left it.

For consultancy the bidding document has its own name. The consultancy manual, at para 5.3.2 under Rule 186, calls the request for proposal “the bidding document in which the technical and financial proposals from the consultants are obtained” and adds that it “is sent only to the short-listed consultants”. So it is rarely a document anyone downloads off the open portal: shortlisting comes first, through an expression of interest or a limited enquiry, and the request for proposal follows to the firms that survived it. It carries the terms of reference, the evaluation criteria and the selection method the assignment will be decided by.

Items the policy takes out of open competition altogether. The Development Commissioner's FAQ of 25 March 2022 answers that there are 358 items reserved for exclusive purchase from the micro and small enterprise sector. The Amendment Order of 8 December 2022 inserted a provision under which requests from central ministries, departments and public sector undertakings for exemption from procuring certain items from the reserved list through open tendering are considered case by case. The list belongs to the order, so a tender for a reserved item says so on its face.

A round in which sellers compete by lowering their quoted prices in real time, offered on GeM beside the online bidding tool. Above the Rule 149 ceiling a buyer must obtain bids “using online bidding or reverse auction tool provided on GeM” (either tool answers the rule), and the same tools may be used for procurements below that ceiling. GeM's own home page lists direct purchase, bid and reverse auction as its procurement modes. Which tool a tender uses is stated in the tender itself.

On works contracts the buyer holds money back as the job proceeds. The works manual describes it plainly: in addition to performance security, works contracts usually provide for a percentage of each running bill, usually 5 per cent, to be withheld as security deposit or retention money until final acceptance, releasable earlier against a bank guarantee. The same manual notes that earnest money, instead of being released, may be rolled into the deposit. The two instruments are counted together in the rule: for works, performance security plus security deposit or retention money stays within 3 to 10 per cent of contract value.

In a single-cover tender there is one upload and one opening: eligibility documents, technical particulars and price are all seen at the same sitting. It suits purchases where the specification is settled and the only real question is price. The goods manual reserves the two-envelope arrangement for technically complex requirements, and even there qualifies it by value and by how critical the source of supply is, which leaves the ordinary supply tender in a single cover. The central portal's manual kit carries its own submission guide for single-cover tenders, separate from the multi-cover ones.

The Works Manual's definition, at para 3.9.1(4)(b) 3.1, is “an ongoing work in which payment equal to or more than 90% of the present contract value has been made to the contractor in that ongoing contract, and the work or a major part of it is in a usable condition for its intended purpose”, with no proceedings for termination on account of the contractor's default pending. The engineer-in-charge or the employer issues a certificate of substantial completion containing two parts. Whether such a work counts is for the tender's own qualification criteria to say, and a bid that misses them is rejected as non-responsive.

The goods manual defines it exactly: the first envelope, “called the techno-commercial bid, contains the eligibility, technical quality and performance aspects, commercial terms and conditions and documents sought in the tender, except the price and relevant financial details”. Two things follow. Commercial terms (delivery, warranty, payment, deviations) sit here rather than with the price, so a deviation offered in this cover is what the buyer evaluates. And every certificate, registration, turnover statement and similar-work certificate the tender asked for belongs here; a document remembered after opening cannot be added to it.

The tender document, or tender schedule, is everything the buyer wants answered. On the central e-procurement system it is what “enables the Tenderers to download the Tender Schedule free of cost and then submit the bids online through this portal”. Inside it are the instructions to bidders, the eligibility and qualification criteria, the technical specifications, the bill of quantities or price schedule, the general and special conditions of contract, and the forms a bid has to be made on. Reading it early is most of bid preparation, because the qualification criteria buried in it decide whether a bid is evaluated at all.

The tender fee is what a buyer charges for the tender document itself. The goods manual discourages it: “normally, no tender document fee should be charged”, and in exceptional cases only “a bare minimum cost of tender documents to defray the expenses/ effort of preparing documents, drawings, etc.” Electronic tendering has made the charge rarer still, since the document is a download. Where a fee does appear, the micro and small enterprise policy takes it away for enterprises inside the policy, which are facilitated “by providing them tender sets free of cost”. It is paid online with the bid, and it is not refundable.

On a NIC portal these are named stages with named screens: tender opening, technical evaluation, financial bid opening, financial evaluation and award of contract, with a “live bid opening view for the bidders” so a firm can watch its own cover being decrypted. Opening only decrypts and records; the work is the evaluation that follows, in which the tender committee tests each bid against the eligibility conditions, the qualification criteria and the specifications. Nothing about price enters that test, and on most tenders the committee's technical decision is the decision that settles who is still in the running.

Rule 163 describes the two-bid system as the “simultaneous receipt of separate technical and financial bids”, used for high-value plant and machinery of a complex and technical nature. Both parts are submitted at once, so nobody can price against knowledge of the field; only the technical part is opened first. The goods manual states what electronic tendering makes of it: the bidder uploads two files, and “in e-procurement, financial bids of technically non-compliant offers would remain encrypted and unopened”. A bidder who fails the technical test therefore never has a price read out, which is the point of the arrangement.

Approval by the buyer itself, which a portal enrolment does not give and does not replace. Indian Railways runs UVAM, described on its e-procurement system as a digitisation initiative through which all the activities related to approval of vendors have been digitised, with requests submitted and their status tracked online through the vendor's own account. BHEL publishes its tender and corrigendum notifications beside its own supplier scheme. NHPC's tender pages carry both things at once: the empanelment the company runs, and the enrolment on the central portal that bidding needs.