Wipro arm becomes lowest bidder, gets Aadhaar project

May 8, 2011 at 2:39 pm | Posted in The Market | Comments Off on Wipro arm becomes lowest bidder, gets Aadhaar project

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Wipro arm becomes lowest bidder, gets Aadhaar project

Surabhi Agarwal, surabhi.a@livemint.com

An arm of Wipro Ltd has emerged as the lowest bidder for providing server, storage and networking solutions to data centres in Bangalore and New Delhi for the Aadhaar project, under which the government seeks to provide unique identification numbers to all residents.

Wipro Infotech Ltd has put in a bid of Rs.200 crore to implement the project, according to four officials familiar with the tender process, who declined to be named.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which is spearheading the project, opened the commercial bids on Tuesday.

During the technical evaluation stage, UIDAI had short-listed Wipro, HCL Technologies Ltd and HCL Infosystems Ltd, which had bid along with solution providers Cisco and EMC, according to the officials.

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, International Business Machines Corp. and Hewlett-Packard were disqualified at this stage. Some of these companies have objected to the way the contract was awarded.

“The entire tender process was a waste of time for other vendors as UIDAI clearly wanted the technical specifications that only Cisco and EMC could match,” said an official with one of the companies that was disqualified. “They are looking for solutions that they might not even need right now and are also very expensive.”

One of the vendors has approached the ministry of communications and information technology on the matter. “DIT (department of information technology) has referred it back to UIDAI,” said another official.

A UIDAI official, who did not want to be named, rejected the claims of the disqualified vendors. “The bids were rejected because of non-compliance with the specifications and requirements we had laid out in the tender document,” the official said. “For a project of such magnitude, we need very high enterprise quality products and solutions provided by EMC and Cisco were not the only solutions needed. There was a whole stack of products and software which were considered in the technical evaluation process.”

Spokespersons of Wipro, Cisco and EMC declined to comment.

The present contract is also considered a precursor to the managed service provider (MSP) contract, which is expected to be about 10 times its size.

“Maybe this is an indication that the UIDAI wants all vendors to bid along with EMC and Cisco only,” said the first official quoted above.

The contract will manage the applications and the infrastructure for the data centre which is required to store the Aadhaar enrolment. So far, UIDAI has issued unique identification numbers to two million people.

Earlier, UIDAI had given the contract to set up the data centres in Bangalore and New Delhi to Bharti Airtel Ltd and Wipro respectively.

“The mandate of the MSP, when it will get selected, will be to put all the different pieces of the technology together—such as the biometrics, application development etc and make sure that they all talk to each other and are continuously upgraded,” said another official from one of the firms involved.

The official added that the MSP contract will also include the server, storage and network component as it will be required to scale up the operations. So far, UIDAI has shortlisted nine technology companies for the MSP contract, which is expected to be the biggest of all the projects UIDAI has given out so far.

The shortlisted firms will submit bids for it following which UIDAI will select a service provider.