What is the scope of judicial review of award of contracts was the issue before Court in the matter namely, Jagdish Mandal vs. State of Orissa and Ors., decided on 11.12.2006 [MANU/SC/0090/2007 = [2006] Supp (10) SCR606].
It was raised as contention that the scope of interference in judicial review of tender processes and award of contracts is limited only to cases where there are material violations of the terms relating to scrutiny and acceptance of tenders or where the decision is vitiated either by arbitrariness/irrationality or by mala fides/favoritism.
It was held that judicial review of administrative action intends to prevent arbitrariness, irrationality, unreasonableness, bias and malafides. It is to check whether choice or decision is made ‘lawfully’ and not to check whether choice or decision is ‘sound’.
When the power of judicial review is invoked in matters relating to tenders or award of contracts, certain special features should be borne in mind. A contract is a commercial transaction. Evaluating tenders and awarding contracts are essentially commercial functions. Principles of equity and natural justice stay at a distance. If the decision relating to award of contract is bona fide and is in public interest, courts will not, in exercise of power of judicial review, interfere even if a procedural aberration or error in assessment or prejudice to a tenderer, is made out.
The power of judicial review will not be permitted to be invoked to protect private interest at the cost of public interest, or to decide contractual disputes. The tenderer or contractor with a grievance can always seek damages in a civil court. Attempts by unsuccessful tenderers with imaginary grievances, wounded pride and business rivalry, to make mountains out of molehills of some technical/procedural violation or some prejudice to self, and persuade courts to interfere by exercising power of judicial review, should be resisted. Such interferences, either interim or final, may hold up public works for years, or delay relief and succour to thousands and millions and may increase the project cost manifold.
Court before interfering in tender or contractual matters in exercise of power of judicial review, should pose to itself the following questions:
(i) Whether the process adopted or decision made by the authority is mala fide or intended to favour someone; or Whether the process adopted or decision made is so arbitrary and irrational that the court can say: ‘the decision is such that no responsible authority acting reasonably and in accordance with relevant law could have reached.’ and (ii) Whether public interest is affected.
If answers to above question are in negative, there should be no interference under Article 226. Cases involving black-listing or imposition of penal consequences on a tendered/contractor or distribution of state largesse (allotment of sites/shops, grant of licences, dealerships and franchises) stand on a different footing as they may require a higher degree of fairness in action.
After a Winter Break that lasted for over five weeks, students at the College struggle to come back. (Rob Birnohm / Cartoonist)
On Finding a Set of Healthy Individuals From a Large Population | School of Technology and Computer Science
Abstract: In this talk, we consider the problem of finding a given number of "healthy" items from a large population containing a small number of "defective" items using nonadaptive group testing. Such problems arise, for example, in the spectrum hole search problem for the cognitive radio (CR) networks. It is well-known that the primary user occupancy (active set) is sparse in the frequency domain over a wideband of interest. To setup a CR network, the secondary users need to find an appropriately wide unoccupied (inactive) frequency band. Thus, the main interest here is the identification of only a sub-band out of the total available unoccupied band, i.e., it is an inactive subset recovery problem. Another example is a product manufacturing plant, where a small shipment of non-defective (inactive) items has to be delivered at high priority. Once again, the interest here is in the identification of a subset of the non-defective items using as few tests as possible.
For this problem, we present mutual information based upper and lower bounds on the number of nonadaptive grouptests required to identify a given number of healthy items. We show that an impressive reduction in the number of testsis achievable compared to the approach of first identifying all the defective items and then picking the required number of healthy items from the complement set. Further, in the nonadaptive group testing setup, we obtain upper and lower bounds on the number of tests under both dilution and additive noise models, and show that the bounds are order-wise tight. Our results are derived using a general sparse signal model, by virtue of which, they are also applicable to other important sparse signal based applications such as compressive sensing (this is joint work with Abhay Sharma).