MP high court stays ₹350 crore school uniform tender, seeks govt response

THe Madhya Pradesh heights margaret court has stayed a ₹350-crore tenderize for supplying uniforms to thomas more than 5.2 jillion students in government-run primary and middle schools across the state after a local apparel association challenged the eligibility conditions in the bidding process.The divisional bench of acting chief justice Vivek Rusia and justice Vinay Saraf, hearing the matter on Wednesday, directed the state government to file its reply within a week. “Till then the tender in question will not be finalised,” the court said.A petition was filed by the Jabalpur Apparel Innovation and Manufacturing Association (JAIMA), challenging “restrictive conditions” in the tender document.Lawyer Vimal Kant Jain, appearing for JAIMA, told the court that the eligibility criteria framed by the Madhya Pradesh Textbook Corporation for the tender effectively exclude local industries.“The mandatory annual turnover of ₹700 crore for spinning mills, ₹233 crore for garment manufacturers, a production capacity of five million uniforms per year, and prior experience of similar work worth ₹105 crore in the past three years, shut out Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), powerloom units, weavers, women’s self-help groups, and small-scale industries from the process,” he said.JAIMA secretary Ajit Modi said the conditions run counter to the Madhya Pradesh Store Purchase and Service Procurement Rules, 2023, which were designed to ensure fair opportunities for MSMEs and encourage local industries. “Instead, the criteria appear is tailored to benefit a handful of big companies from outside the state,” he alleged.In an HT story published on July 6, MSME minister Chetan Kashyap had said that the centralised procurement system was meant to support industrialists and MSME traders and that they would look into concerns raised by MSME traders.The report had also quoted several members of self-help groups and MSME garment unit owners who claimed that the government decision to take away school uniform-making work from self-help groups would impact thousands of livelihoods across the state.School education minister Rao Uday Pratap Singh had earlier said that the new centralised mechanism would ensure uniform quality and timely delivery of uniforms. “Women were facing problems in supplying on time and there were issues with quality of cloth being used,” he said.In Madhya Pradesh, more than 1.4 lakh women from SHGs had earlier been trained by the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, to stitch and manage uniform supplies, a programme launched by then chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan in 2018.