Senior Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala has demanded an apology from Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and Cooperation Minister V N Vasavan following a High Court order that stayed further proceedings in a controversial software tender involving cooperative societies in the state.
The Kerala High Court’s intervention came after it observed prima facie evidence of alleged misappropriation in the project aimed at installing software across 4,415 branches of 1,612 cooperative societies. Chennithala said the court’s decision vindicated his earlier allegations, which had been dismissed by the state government.
The Congress Working Committee member criticised the Chief Minister for allegedly ridiculing his claims regarding irregularities in the tender process. He also accused Vasavan of trivialising the issue with remarks that compared the allegations to predicting the horoscope of an unborn child, calling such responses inappropriate given the seriousness of the matter.
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At the centre of the controversy is the alleged attempt to award the contract to a consortium linked to the Dinesh Cooperative Society, which Chennithala claims was favoured despite submitting a significantly higher bid. He further alleged that the tender process was manipulated to benefit the consortium, raising questions about transparency and fairness.
Chennithala also claimed that reputed firms, including Tata Consultancy Services, were effectively excluded from the bidding process. He pointed to stark differences in the financial proposals submitted by competing bidders to highlight alleged discrepancies in the evaluation process.
According to figures cited by Chennithala, Malabar Information Technology (MITCO) quoted Rs 231.7 crore for implementing the project across all branches, while the Dinesh consortium quoted Rs 49.9 crore for just 280 branches. He argued that extrapolating the latter’s rates statewide would inflate the project cost to nearly Rs 785 crore, approximately Rs 550 crore higher than MITCO’s proposal, intensifying concerns over potential financial irregularities.
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