‘Vivaad se Samvad Se Vishwas’, is Modi government’s text of enterprise conduct. The keywords reflect the transformative movement from conflict to dialogue culminating in the targeted goal of business confidence. Officers are expected to be active protagonists of this working philosophy, use analytical skills and find creative solutions for problems.

This is the reason that the BSNL mobile billing tender and its aftermath is an important case study, of the dangers officers face when implementing the Prime Minister’s vision. Our cover story presents every side of the story with evidence and sequence on all sides. What unfolds is a process of victimization of senior officers by telecom secretary, Neeraj Mittal and how he is botching up projects from being rolled out, impacting the revenues of a company which is attempting turnaround from stress after repeated government bailouts.

What did the BSNL officers do? BSNL had invited a tender for the supply, installation, testing, commissioning and annual maintenance of IT hardware and related software for BSNL’s Centralized Mobile Billing System, and Probe based IPDR Management Solution.

Four bidders participated in this tender. Further evaluation process went through 13 officers of BSNL – six present and former directors on the Board including the former CMD; four senior officers of CET at the level of GM and PGM, and three junior level officers. They applied well established process and determined Class I and II (local content rules) parameters for verifying Make in India claims.

BSNL officers further secured a 9 per cent reduction in price during negotiations and the purchase order was issued to the L1 bidder. Then all of a sudden, within 3 weeks, without any complaint the PO was rescinded, the vendor was told to stop shipments first verbally and then through a written letter. All the 13 officers involved in the process were slapped with vigilance action suspecting their integrity. Legal recourse followed. The court has ruled against PO cancellation of L1 bidder and arguments on compromised integrity of officers.

Meanwhile, an important project is hung out to dry, as are the officers who worked on it.

If these are the professional risks, who can blame mid and senior level officers of being wary of taking action? No officer wants to be at the receiving end of vigilance hunting for doing one’s job. Incidents such as these become historical data points for preferring inertia to problem solving.