Maharashtra Housing Development Authority v. Shapoorji Pallonji & Co. Pvt. Ltd.
(2018) 2 SCC (Civ) 12 : (2018) 3 SCC 13 : AIR 2018 SC 945
In the Supreme Court of India
Civil Appeal 1836/2018
Before Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice R. Banumathi
Decided on February 12, 2018

Relevancy of the Case: Submission of a bid affected because of a technical glitch in the bidding process

Statutes and Provisions Involved

• Information Technology Act, 2000 (Section 13)

Relevant Facts of the Case

• In this present case, the Appellant, the Maharashtra Housing Development Authority (MHADA), issued an e-tender for inviting various proposals for the technical, design and financial aid for a redevelopment project. Also, the e-tender process required the bidders to submit their bids in two stages, technical and financial.
• The respondent company had uploaded the bid at 12:16 hours on July 27, 2017. This was well before the deadline of 12:00 hours on the same date. Thereafter, the respondent’s claimed that they pressed the freeze button, but they did not receive an acknowledgement of their bid.
• There were certain correspondences between the parties on this issue. Subsequently, MHADA requested the respondent to contact National Informatics Centre (NIC) to manage the tender process.
• This appeal challenges a Bombay High Court order on this issue. The High Court directed NIC to decrypt the files associated with this tender. Further, MHADA should consider the decrypted files as a valid bid.
• NIC had submitted that they follow the procedure of bidding as laid by the Government guidelines. Also, they do not have keys or any approved process to access encrypted files for this invalid bid. Moreover, NIC submitted that they cannot retrieve the files for the respondent’s bid. They cannot use the MHADA’s encryption key because the bidding event has already been completed.

Opinion of the Bench

• NIC and MHADA have jointly submitted that the retrieval of documents is not feasible. In this context, the High Court order can hardly be determinative of the issue at hand.
• The High Court order asks NIC and MHADA to go beyond the government-issued guidelines on the e-tender portal management. Hence, this is an invalid order.
• All other bidders received the acknowledgements when they submitted their bids. However, in the absence of any technological glitch, the respondent’s bid was not valid.

Final Decision

• The bench allowed the appeal.