Bumblebees can fly Indian Express SAUBHIK CHAKRABARTI Wednesday, February 01, 2006 at 0000 hours IST
Airport reform wasn't perfect. But good enough to ignore labour leaders and capitalists My favourite poster carries a finely detailed image of a bee and the legend, 'According to the laws of aerodynamics, a bumblebee cannot fly. The bumblebee doesn't know aerodynamics. So it flies anyway.' I find that smart, funny and wonderfully practical. I also humbly recommend this pop wisdom to judges all over the country as bid selection for airport modernisation ends and the battle of the disaffected begins. Courts are likely to deal with appeals from not only losing bidders but also perhaps from that repository of professionalism, technical excellence and service ethos, the Airports Authority of India Joint Employees Forum (AAIJEF). Delhi airport's bid winner, the Indo-German consortium, GMR Fraport, has already moved a caveat in expectation of legal challenges. Mumbai's winner, the Indo-South African consortium, GVK ACSA, must be bracing for challenges as well. Most challenges will argue this: according to the laws of a perfect bidding process, Delhi and Mumbai airports' modernisation contracts should not be awarded at this point. What our judges will hopefully remember is this: we don't know (no one knows) how to design a perfect bidding process, so (assuming there's no gross, identifiable impropriety) we should let the winning bids stand anyway. To see why the bumblebee argument should be redrafted in this fashion, look at the objections to the bidding process. Cutting a complicated story short and saying something that's normally only whispered in Delhi's power corridors - much, though by no means all, of the initial criticism arose from the fact that the bid by Reliance (the Anil Ambani controlled part of the now divided empire) was supposed to be favoured. Anil Ambani didn't win. And there is already another set of whispers - his bid was unfairly treated. The Ambani-is-being-coddled argument came when the civil aviation ministry-appointed consultants - Amarchand Mangaldas, Airplan and ABN Amro - evaluated the technical bids in September 2005. GMR Fraport and Reliance-ASA (ASA runs Mexico City's airport and a clutch of others in Mexico) were named the best bidders. Allegations were made that the consultants, some of whom got a lot of business from Reliance, had rigged markings so that the Anil Ambani consortium made the top grade. Another argument was that the consultants had been too "subjective". Reliance had replied in December that the consultants who do business with it also do a lot of business with other Indian corporates and, therefore, such conflicts of interest can be always and forever posited. Its counter to "subjective evaluation" was that the rules of assessment were known since April 2005. Therefore, Reliance in effect argued, objections came suspiciously late. A government review committee (GRC) that looked into the consultants' report had concluded that apparent bias in favour of any bidder was not evident and that the criteria on which bids were evaluated were "necessarily subjective". But a cabinet note that was prepared on the basis of this review also observed than an inter-ministerial group (IMG) had been concerned over the methodology of marking employed by the consultants. Sharper objections were raised by Gajendra Haldea, a Planning Commission member and part of the review process, who argued for another technical evaluation. Interestingly, neither the GRC nor the IMG wanted to go as far as Haldea's suggestion. But, more interestingly, when the empowered group of ministers (EGoM) came into the picture it did ask for a review from the cabinet secretary, who outsourced it to E. Sreedharan, the man behind the Delhi Metro. This was the origin of whispers that Anil Ambani's bid was being given a raw treatment post facto. Sreedharan more or less agreed that the consultants' markings were not above scrutiny. The cabinet secretary endorsed this. The EGoM then decided that it would make the final awards after examining the financial bids. That meant GMR Fraport, the only bidder whose technical qualification was uncontroversial, would have had to match the highest financial bidder, in case its own financial bid wasn't the highest. That also meant that the Reliance ASA bid, whose claim had seemed controversially unassailable when the consultants had given their report, would have had to compete against other bids. And that is more or less what happened, GMR Fraport matched Reliance ASA's financial bid for the Delhi airport, after having been given a choice, courtesy its status as the clearest technical qualifier, of picking between Delhi and Mumbai. For the Mumbai airport, GVK ACSA won because its financial bid outmatched all others. This meant that Reliance's status, after the consultants' report, as the other technically qualified bidder didn't give it the edge that GMR Fraport got. So, Anil Ambani's people are pretty mad now. They join the Left, the airport unions and possibly some other losing bidders. But what does our necessarily ultra-brief but hopefully clear summary of the bidding story tell us? If the consultants were being partial, they were - in however convoluted a fashion - not allowed to have the only and final say on technical qualifications. If the consultants had an opinion that was honest but could be improved, that was attempted too, although again in a complicated fashion. If Reliance was pulling strings, it couldn't pull them hard enough. If Reliance was above board but was witch-hunted, it still had a sporting chance in financial bids, where it was outbidded. Of course, in between these lines there may be tales of lobbying and counter-lobbying that we don't know, may never come to know. But ultimately is that more important or the fact that no one is saying the two winning bidders, GMR Fraport and GVK ACSA, cut murky deals to get there? If the story remains at that point, if concrete evidence of sleaze doesn't come out, should Delhi and Mumbai airport bids be cancelled because the bidding process should have been better organised? Over the next few days a lot of "experts" will weigh in. Ambani lawyers and AAI unions will be effectively on the same side. It will be very confusing. There'll be a lot of buzz. Just remember the bumblebee.
