New Delhi: The Indian Railways has brought its commercial earning and non-fare revenue contracts online, with no financial turnover requirement for annual contracts of up to Rs. 40 lakh. In line with the prevailing e-auction of scrap sale, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw launched e-auction for commercial earning and non-fare revenue (NFR) contracts.
The earning assets up for auction will be parcel vans, pay-and-use toilets, advertisement rights on station circulating areas and coaches, air-conditioned waiting rooms, cloak rooms, parking lots, plastic bottle crushers, ATMs, station co-branding, video screens for content on demand etc.
These assets will be mapped location-wise on the portal once and the system will remember forever if it is covered for earning or not. This will improve the monitoring of assets on a real-time basis and minimise asset-idling.
In the e-auction process, a bidder from anywhere in the country needs to self-register once for participating in the auctions of any field unit of the Indian Railways through the portal. Bids can be placed remotely for the management rights of an asset after depositing the earnest money (EMD) electronically.
A successful bidder would be able to receive acceptance online and through e-mail in a very short span of time. Except the requirement of financial turnover, as such all the eligibility criteria have been removed. “Further, the financial requirement has been relaxed to a great extent. There is no financial turnover requirement for annual contracts of up to Rs. 40 lakh,” the minister said. A pilot for the project was launched in 11 divisions of nine railway zones. A total of 80 contracts of a combined value of Rs. 128 crore were finalized during the pilot launch. During the pilot run, the Ahmedabad division had conducted an e-auction for two parking lots at Gandhidham Junction and Himmatnagar on June 4. For Gandhidham Junction (GIMB), 24 bids were received with the highest one being Rs 12.6 lakh (per annum), which is 38 per cent above the conventional bidding price.
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