ISLAMABAD  -  At the time when federal government is focusing to improve the governance through transparency and openness, the engineering wing of the Capital Development Authority is trying to avoid mandatory disclosure of evaluation reports of procurement. As per the rule 35 of the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority Rules 2004, every public sector organisation is bound to announce the results of every tendering process and same are libel to be shared on the website of the PPRA. However, contrary to the prevailing practice in the public sector organisations, the civic authority is continuously avoiding to share bids evolution reports of multimillion projects on the website of the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA). As for instance, the National Highway Authority (NHA), National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) and dozens of other departments are continuously sharing such reports on PPRA website to ensure transparency and fairness.

However, when it comes to the Capital Development Authority, they never bothered to share any evaluation report with PPRA in the present regime as not even a single report for year 2024 is available on the website. A senior officer of PPRA informed this scribe that the purpose of sharing the reports on the website is to make the tendering process more open, transparent and fair. He said most of the institutions are sharing evaluation reports as it is an established practice to disclose such reports under rule 35. “It is a perfect case for audit officials that how a public sector organisation can avoid sharing evaluation reports from the last four years,” he maintained. When contacted, the Member Engineer CDA Dr. Khalid Hafeez who is an officer of Communications and Works Department Punjab has said the reports should be made public on website of the PPRA. He, however, said it is not in his knowledge that the same are not being uploaded on PPRA website and he will take corrective measure once taking input from the relevant formations. It is pertinent to mention here that CDA has recently established a dedicated formation of the Procurement and Contracts to streamline the procurement processes of the authority.

Initially the same is mandated to do the procurement of contracts above Rs 50 million but sources informed that such big procurements could not be made centralised so far and a lot of work has yet to be done in this regard. 

Sources informed that most of the formations in CDA try to do procurements stand alone as there is a practice of pooling the contracts among the selected contractors, which eventually cost billions of rupees to public exchequer.