Smart metering project designed to facilitate foreign bidders

The qualification criteria laid down for $1 billion Asian Development Bank-funded smart metering project has been designed to facilitate foreign bidders and striking out constitutional rights of local industry as it is a sheer violation of Statutory Regulatory Order (SRO) 827(1)/2001 which stipulates that 'public sector agencies to procure their requirements from within the country and omit such item from the list of barter, credit and loan.'
The energy meter manufacturers have also criticized the ministry of power division for not ensuring a level-playing field as the qualification criteria laid down in the tender both for the contractor and sub-contractor is arbitrary and discriminatory.
Nature of the tailor-made qualifications of this international tender is such that the local meter manufacturers are automatically excluded from the bidding process. In case of a single entity, the accumulative amount of bidders' participation in the contract must exceed $100 million and participation in at least one contract must exceed $40 million. In case of a joint venture (JV), the accumulative amount of bidder's participation (all partners combined) should exceed $100 million and participation of one of the partners in, at least, one contract must exceed $40 million.
A letter to the concerned authorities, written by the All Pakistan Energy Meter Manufacturers, suggest that total required quantity of AMI meters under the scope is about 900,000 and 90 percent quantity of meters is to be supplied with PLC communication and rest of 10 percent with GSM/GPRS. In fact, the PLC-based energy meters have not been installed in Pakistan in bulk quantity, whereas field proven GSM/GPRS based major smart metering projects have been successfully deployed in Pakistan with efficient performance. Therefore, the manufacturers have advised the government to adopt the policy of deploying a pilot project of at least 25000 metering connections over PLC and GSM/GPRS communication network for a certain period to judge the effects of all seasons in the typical distribution network of the country before launching of such a huge project on commercial basis.
Also, they said, the tender carries a unique requirement of meter to withstand up to 8kV Electro Static Discharge (ESC) for tripping mechanism. This type of meter, they said, has never been procured and installed in Pakistan as no such meter is freely available in the market. Therefore, such a unique requirement has been added to the tender to favour some international bidder.
The tender documents also require that the meters should be type tested by a laboratory accredited by ILAC and accepted by the client in Pakistan. Whereas, in Pakistan, there are peculiar local technical specifications being evolved over the past 30 years field experience. The local specifications are designed as per local requirements with comprehensive anti-tampering features.
The NTDC carries out type testing as per its issued standards and specifications. No specific reference of current local specifications is mentioned with the bidding documents to be followed for the type tests of meters. The manufacturers have stressed a change in the bidding document before inviting biddings from the interested contenders. They said a level-playing field should be ensured to the local metering industry in light of the instructions under SRO 827.