New Delhi, Sep 8 (KNN) The Ministry of Finance has recently uploaded the draft of revised Manual on Policies and Procedures for Purchase of Goods in its website for public comments.

The notice issued in this regard says the manual will ultimately replace the GFR or General Financial Rules, the ubiquitous guidelines for procurement of more than Rs. 35,00,000 crore worth of Goods and Services by the Government every year.

The notice issued on 23^rd August, 2016, specifies 15 days for uploading the comments on the same, which may be too short.

As the document is too important for the entire economy, the stakeholders have asked the Government to extend the date.

The elaborate document specifies procedures and processes for all types of Government procurements - goods, services and works and in all quantities starting from petty purchases to huge global tenders.

The decade old GFR is considered as a big hurdle in bringing efficiency, transparency and economy in public procurement and there was widespread demand, from civil societies to international bodies for its scrapping.

The proposed manual contains quite a new feature like the concept of ‘value for money’ (VfM) to justify procurement from both cost as well as quality aspects.

While it also mentions about the ‘life time cost’ approach, the age old, ‘L1’ concept have been retained thus limiting the discretion of the purchasing ministry to go for quality rather than cost.

The L1 or the concept of buying from the lowest cost tenderer is a cynosure of all quality oriented Government vendors and quite a few expert bodies were asking for its replacement by the life time costing model.

The approach of weightage to cost and technical/ commercial ratings as generally followed by international agencies like World Bank, is also not visible in the present document.

Other salient feature of the manual is signing of transparency agreement by each supplier and a detail guidelines for blacklisting.

It also refers to INCOTERM, the globally agreed procedure for procurements.

With the Public Procurement Bill 2012 appears to in cold storage, the revision of the GFR will surely bring some ‘easing of ding business’ for the MSMEs. (KNN/ DB)