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LC Infra Projects Private Limited & Ors. vs. Municipal Corporation of Delhi & Anr.

Writ Petition (Civil) · 2026:DHC:7318-DBDecided 1 Sept 2026New Delhi Bench
W.P.(C) 12267/2026CNR: DLHC010394872026
Justice V. Kameswar Rao · Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora

Background

The petitioners formed a Consortium that bid on a large MCD tender (worth over Rs. 1,367 crore) for replacing public streetlights across six zones of Delhi over ten years. Their bid was rejected because the required Bank Guarantee (part of the roughly Rs. 13.77 crore Earnest Money Deposit) had been applied for and issued in the name of one Consortium member (Esmart Energy Solutions Limited), while the covering letter submitted with the bid was in the name of the lead member (LC Infra Projects), and MCD found no document expressly connecting the two, treating this mismatch as non-conformity with the tender conditions.

Decision Breakdown

The Court held MCD's rejection unsustainable because nothing in the tender's Request for Proposal or its later Corrigendum actually required that the Bank Guarantee specifically be furnished by the lead member of a Consortium: MCD itself conceded in its affidavit that no such express bar existed. While a tender-inviting authority is normally given wide latitude to interpret its own tender conditions, that latitude does not extend to inventing a condition that was never written into the tender documents in the first place; if MCD wanted the Bank Guarantee tied specifically to the lead member, it needed to say so explicitly. The Court directed MCD to admit the bid and proceed to technically evaluate it, without pronouncing on whether the bid otherwise satisfies all tender requirements.

Lesson Learnt

A government tendering authority cannot reject a bid for failing to meet a condition that was never actually written into the tender document: if it wants strict requirements (such as which consortium member must furnish a bank guarantee), it must spell those out clearly in advance rather than read them in later at the evaluation stage.

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