Consultants, CAs & Advisers

Who buys in this sector

A professional practice meets public procurement from two sides at once: as a bidder for consultancy work, and as the person a tender names to sign something.

As a bidder, the buyers are the same buyers everyone else has. Central ministries and departments engage consultants under GFR 2017, whose consultancy rules run from the selection method to the contract; Rule 186 governs the request for proposals and Rule 192 the weighting of quality against cost. Public-sector undertakings publish expressions of interest beside their ordinary tender and corrigendum notifications. The Government e Marketplace carries services categories of its own. State departments and corporations engage advisers through their own instances.

As the professional a tender names, the buyer is invisible: the requirement sits in an order the tender adopts, and the client is the bidder. The Make in India order says who may certify local content: “the statutory auditor or cost auditor of the company (in the case of companies) or from a practicing cost accountant or practicing chartered accountant (in respect of suppliers other than companies).”Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce and IndustryThe certificate is a condition of the bid, and the professional who signs it is named in the order rather than chosen by the bidder.

The rulebook for the first role is the Manual for Procurement of Consultancy Services, whose own preface fixes its rank: it “adheres to the relevant laws, GFR, and clarifications/ OMs issued by the Procurement Policy Division … In case of inconsistencies between this Manual and prevailing law or GFR, the extant law and GFR shall prevail.” Where the manuals sit against each other is on The rules.

What they tender for

The consultancy manual names auditors and procurement agents as the standard-and-routine end of its scale. Assignments packaged as non-consultancy services have a separate Department of Expenditure manual.

The selection method is the thing to read first, because it decides what a proposal is for. The manual names four: “Least Cost Selection (LCS)”, “Quality and Cost Based Selection (QCBS)”, “Fixed Budget based Selection (FBS)” and “Direct Selection: Single Source Selection (SSS)”. Under LCS a proposal that clears the technical benchmark is ranked on price; under QCBS technical quality and price are combined on a split the tender states, and the manual's own weighting table is described as “suggestive”. The benchmark and the weightings are stated once on this site, on how the winner is chosen.

Where the tenders are published

Consultancy work usually arrives in two stages, and the first is public. Shortlisting is done through “an openly advertised competitive (OTE mode) shortlisting process called Expression of Interest (EoI)”, and under it the request for expressions of interest “is advertised on Central Public Procurement Portal (CPPP) at www.eprocure.gov.in (opens in a new tab) and on Government e-Marketplace (GeM).” So the EOI is on CPPP and on GeM; the RFP that follows is “sent only to the short-listed consultants” and is never advertised at all.

A practice that watches only tender listings therefore sees the second stage of nothing. Public-sector undertakings publish their own EOIs on their own sites, states on the state instances, and a smaller assignment may be shortlisted without a published notice at all. Which portal belongs to which buyer is on The portals.

The clauses that decide eligibility here

When you are the bidder. The named experts are the eligibility: their qualifications, their years on comparable assignments and their availability for this one, evidenced by curricula vitae in the technical proposal. Alongside them sit the firm's own similar assignments, its turnover, and the associations or joint arrangements the tender permits. How a buyer counts similar experience and turnover is on similar work and turnover; what fails at the technical stage is on why bids are rejected at technical evaluation.

When you are the certifier. Three documents come to a practice again and again.

• The local-content certificate. Above the value the Make in India order sets, a Class-I or Class-II local supplier must produce a certificate “giving the percentage of local content” from the auditor or practising accountant the order names, and the Goods Manual reproduces the order's requirement that for contracts above that value the certification is “duly certified by cost/ chartered accountant in practice”. The threshold, the classes and the margin are on Class-I, Class-II or non-local.
• Turnover and net-worth certificates, in the form the instructions to bidders prescribe, for the years the tender counts and on the figures the tender defines, which are not always the figures a financial statement presents.
• The client's registrations. Udyam registration is what proves a micro or small enterprise to a buyer and what carries the benefits the MSE order gives; a GeM seller profile asks for the authorised person's identity, the business PAN, the bank account, the registered and billing addresses with GSTIN, and income-tax return details; and a digital signature certificate of the class the portal requires, issued by a licensed Certifying Authority after the holder presents themselves before a Registration Authority, is what makes an online bid possible at all. Each is on Before you can bid.

Money in these bids

This is general information; confirm with the tender document and your adviser.

The questions a practice is asked come back in the same order, and each has an owner.

Deposits. Whether earnest money is payable, whether a bid securing declaration is accepted instead, and whether a client's registration exempts it: EMD exemptions and the bid-securing declaration. What is held after award, and for how long, is on what is held back after you win. The MSE order is blunt about its own limits: “there is no exemption on Security Deposit/ Performance Bank Guarantee under the Policy.”

Thresholds. The marketplace slabs reset by the office memorandum of 10 July 2024, and the value above which a tender must be advertised openly under GFR 2017, decide which route a purchase must take: selling on GeM: registration and purchase slabs and How procurement works.

Preferences. What the MSE policy gives, and what it does not reach, on what the MSE policy gives and does not.

Deductions. A government buyer deducts tax at source from a professional bill under two separate Acts, and the rates, thresholds and returns are an accountant's own ground rather than a tender page's. Where a client asks what will actually reach their account, the answer belongs in the engagement, not in the tender document.