While determining the need for any public procurement as prescribed in sub-section (1) of section 5 of the Act, procuring entities shall consider and assess its essentiality on the matters as follows :-
(1) The Public Procurement is essential for public services. It shall be the obligation and primary responsibility of the concerned procuring entity to ensure that no procurement that is not clearly essential to public services is made by it.
(2) The quality, including the technical, performance and qualitative characteristics, the specific quantum and the extent or scope of the subject matter of procurement relating to the need so determined shall be clearly spelt out by the procuring entity to avoid unwarranted expenditure or idle inventories. The procuring entity shall not include superfluous and non-essential quantum or features of the subject matter of procurement or exceed scale, consumption or usage limits of requirements as laid down in its extent or scope and shall ensure that:-
(a) the purpose or solution sought to be obtained by the proposed procurement is sustainable;
(b) the maintenance costs, where applicable, are reasonable and justified;
(c) the proposed subject matter of procurement is compatible and interoperable with existing infrastructure or system.
(3) The technical specifications, detailed project report, terms of reference shall be so developed as to ensure value for money, a level playing field and wider competition in procurement, where applicable. The technical specifications shall to the extent practicable:-
(a) be based on the national technical regulations or recognized national standards, wherever such standards exist, or engineering, building codes and in their absence, be based on the relevant international standards:
Provided that a procuring entity may, for reasons to be recorded in writing, adopt any other technical specification;
(b) shall emphasize sustainability criteria such as efficiency, optimum fuel or power consumption, low maintenance cost and environment criteria such as reduced pollution, emission, noise levels, etc. and shall comply with 4 applicable legal and statutory regulations.
(4) The procuring entities shall work out the estimated costs in a realistic and objective manner with due diligence, this being a vital element in procurement processes like approvals, establishing reasonableness of prices at the time of evaluation of the bids, etc.
(5) The procuring entities shall consider the appropriateness of procurement of common use and other replacement goods, machinery equipment, etc. on buy-back or with exchange value by trading old, unusable items for new ones to avoid dead stock and useless inventories.
(6) All procurement entities shall maintain and preserve documents relating to such assessment and determination of the public need for procurement indicating the nature of the essentiality for public services as Class “B” records as prescribed in the Assam RecordRules.