ZEST PHARMA Vs. STATE OF BIHAR WITH

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE State Health Society, Bihar is a society formed by the Government of Bihar in the Department of Health and Family Welfare. The society has been formed to perform or get performed all State functions by outsourcing services to private entrepreneurs. It is nothing but an extension of the State itself.

(2.) THE State Health Society issued notice inviting tender from Companies and Firms for rate contracting of drugs. Under this tender it is not that the Firms are selected for any particular order of any drug in any quantity but rates of various drugs are settled for a particular period of supply as may be required by the State. The notice inviting tender is Annexure -A to the counter affidavit. One of the conditions of minimum eligibility criteria is a market standing of minimum three years issued by the Licensing Authority of the concerned State. The tenders have to be submitted in two separate envelopes in respect of two separate stages. First is the technical bid where as is usual eligibility to participate is decided. Once this eligibility bid is opened and the tenderer is deemed to be eligible then comes the financial bid which is opened. At the technical bid stage there is no intra party competition, the dispute if any is essential between the State Health Society and the tenderer whose eligibility is in question. It is this stage with which we are concerned in the present case. Petitioner having been held ineligible and having not been communicated with any grounds for holding him ineligible filed the present writ application before this Court. He was only verbally told that as he could not produce the manufacturing license of more than three years duration, he was held to be ineligible. A comprehensive counter affidavit has been filed by the State Health Society. In that the decision of the Technical Core Committee has also been appended. In the counter affidavit the license as filed by the petitioner has also been appended and petitioner 's clarification given is also appended. It may be stated that the clarification was not given on basis of any clarification or show cause issued by the Society but was a clarification given after the petitioner came to know that his financial bid was not being considered. It may be noted that the technical bids were opened on 11th July, 2008 and the clarification is submitted on 14th September, 2008 even without disclosure of grounds as to why petitioner was held to be non - eligible. In this writ application, we have thus to consider whether the rejection of the technical bid of the petitioner was correct or not.

(3.) IN fairness to learned counsel who have tried to appear for intervener, in my view, they have no locus standi as dispute is essentially between the State Health Society and the petitioner whose technical bid has been rejected. Sri S.D. Sanjay and Sri Rajeev Kumar Singh who have sought to intervene did not press their intervention because they submitted that their intervention was only for the purposes of seeking to get the interim stay vacated so that the tender process may continue and they are not interested in either petitioner succeeding or failing before this Court. As the writ petition is being disposed of, their intervention applications itself has become infructuous.