The court’s order came on a plea by four NGOs challenging the tender condition formulated by the Delhi government while inviting bids for the mid-day cooked meals scheme (Express photo: Ravi Kanojia/File)
The Delhi High Court Wednesday quashed the Delhi government’s eligibility condition related to average annual turnover for NGOs seeking tender for the mid-day cooked meal scheme, terming it as “arbitrary” and “unreasonable”.
The High Court observed that the Delhi government’s emphasis that the NGO concerned should be able to sustain itself four months without payment was “baseless and unreasonable” and “wholly irrational and arbitrary”. “A deeper analysis would show that what the government of NCT of Delhi is saying is that its existing administrative capability is so inefficient that the bills of every NGO would take at least four months for processing, which is the reason why the eligibility condition needs to be factored in. This is an extraneous and an entirely unreasonable fact. In fact, it amounts to placing a premium on its own inefficiency in the guise of pragmatism,” a bench of Justice S Ravindra Bhat and Justice A K Chawla said.
It directed the Delhi government to appropriately rework the eligibility condition (of possessing an average annual turnover of Rs 3 crore for the preceding 3 years) and other minimum requirements to enable wider participation of NGOs. “This court is of the opinion that the impugned eligibility condition is arbitrary and unreasonable, and is accordingly quashed,” the bench said. It noted that change in the criteria was influenced by the size of the NGOs who were providing mid-day meals to the three municipal corporations — East, South and North.
The court said that, in its opinion, the blind and uncritical adoption of the municipal corporation-based model of eligibility criteria, which was based on 18 NGOs catering to varying student populations of those schools within their jurisdiction, was “entirely arbitrary and unreasonable”.
The court’s order came on a plea by four NGOs challenging the tender condition formulated by the Delhi government while inviting bids for the mid-day cooked meals scheme. The NGOs had alleged that the eligibility condition of a minimum threshold of Rs 3 crore average financial turnover, during the previous three years, was arbitrary.
The petitioners submitted that they were voluntary NGOs formed between 1995 and 2006 and were ISO certified agencies, and have been providing services to the Delhi government in the past by supplying mid-day meals to children studying in its schools.
The Delhi government had submitted that the re-modeling of the clusters meant that under the request for proposal issued by the Directorate of Education, each successful bidder had to supply to a larger group or cluster, with a minimum student population size of 35,000.