Supreme Court orders tender awarded after calling rejection of e-payment bid security perverse

Hardev Construction Private Limited bid for a railway engineering, procurement and construction project but had its bid rejected for not submitting the "original" of the Bid Security required by the tender's Request for Proposal. The appellant had paid the Bid Security electronically and uploaded a scanned copy of the digital payment receipt; there was no separate physical original to produce, since the money had already reached the respondents' account and remained under their control. The Patna High Court's Division Bench upheld the rejection, and the appellant approached the Supreme Court.

The Court (J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran, JJ.) reiterated that constitutional courts generally defer to a tendering authority's own understanding of its tender conditions, intervening only where that understanding is perverse or mala fide. It found a clear case of perversity here: insisting on an "original" of something that exists only as an electronic payment, already credited to the respondents, demanded an impossibility, and rigid adherence to the letter of a tender document cannot be allowed where compliance in that literal sense is impossible. It set aside the rejection and directed that the contract be awarded to the appellant, once the appellant completes the formality of furnishing the Bid Security, by e-payment or another accepted mode, within the time allowed, after which its financial bid is to be opened and the tender finalised.