Paper No.
670
The bidding and award procedures differ across
countries and sectors and thus contextual empirical
research is required for crafting the right pre
qualification procedures for a given country. For
instance, European Union has established an
over arching procurement process with separate
procedures for handling different sizes of bidders5.
This also highlights the fact that the design of
the procurement process inherently plays a key
role in limiting the number of bidders that will
be allowed to participate in the bidding process.
The EU procedures of selection also vary in the
detail of information required during the tendering
process6. Thus, the procurement procedures have to
be designed in terms of the informational aspects
beforehand so that the desired number of qualified
bidders is allowed to participate in the bidding
process.
Coming to the sectorial landscape of PPP
infrastructure projects in India, PPP projects in
national highways sector is counted as one of the
sectors, besides power sector, which have been able
to successfully attract private capital investment
in India. High level of private sector participation
in national highways sector could be attributed
to the various initiatives and reforms undertaken
by the government in addition to the commercial
attractiveness and the revenue generation potential
of projects. For instance, the Indian Government has
set up well established procedure for procurement
of PPP projects besides drafting of standardised
bid documents and model concession agreements
for different categories of PPP road projects.
Dedicated institutional framework in the form of
establishment of an autonomous implementation
agency, National Highway Authority of India
(NHAI), besides introduction of legal reforms to
enable private sector participation have played
an important role in enhancing private sector
participation in national highways sector.
But these documents are largely prescriptive to
direct the PQ procedures and criteria. Furthermore,
no previous study has attempted to examine how
the PQ limits are employed (and varied) from
project to project in highway sector in order to
make empirical generalizations. To this need, the
current study focus to buttress the procurement
of PPP projects, though inference from highway
projects are used to supplement the relevance and
92 Journal of the indian Roads Congress, July - September, 2017
generalization of the findings. The current study,
therefore, grounds its context and relevance to
Indian conditions in order to make right application
of PQ process. This is achieved by analysing,
comparing and contrasting PPP highway projects.
The main objective of this paper is, therefore, to
examine what criteria encompass the PQ limits and
how to set the PQ limits in case of Indian Highway
PPP projects. The paper has been divided into eight
sections. The next section presents the literature
review on the state of the theory and practice of PQ
limits. This is further carried to Section 3, which
sets the context of the study for PQ of PPP projects
in India. The research design of the current study
is presented in section 4. Section 5 present the
identification of PQ criteria for highway projects.
The identified data set is modelled using simple
multiple linear regression as presented in
section 6. Analysis and discussion is presented in
the section 7. The paper presents few inferences
and concludes by laying practical implications and
direction of future research.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
Most of the studies on PQ design has focused on
projects procured through traditional route. For
instance,7 have asserted, through interviews with
construction stakeholders, that PQ is a three part
process concerned with the characteristics of owner,
contractors and the resulting decision. In order to
operationalize it, Xia et al.8 have developed various
factors that should be taken into consideration while
designing the PQ process of design build projects
based on the data set of United States. Studies on
PQ for projects procured through PPP route, which
differs from traditional procurement, is limited.
Carbonara et al.6 have noted two important reasons
that set PPP tendering process different from
traditional procurement – (i) the parameters used
for evaluation need to encompass all the phases of
PPP project lifecycle, and (ii) there is a need to
ensure strong competition to bring improvement
from value for money perspective. In the similar
lines, De Schepper et al.9 have also stated that the
PPP procurement process has a strong bearing on
various aspects of the projects such as transaction
costs, value of money, and lead time for project
procurement. Furthermore, Doloi 10 has stressed
the need to bring in enough competition as it is