The Delhi High Court has set aside the tender process used to award outsourced Indian consular, passport and visa services in Australia to VFS Global, finding the technical evaluation was arbitrary, irrational and lacked transparency.
A division bench of Justice Anil Kshetrapal and Justice Shail Jain ordered India’s Ministry of External Affairs and the High Commission of India in Canberra to issue a fresh request for proposal within one month.
However, the court permitted the existing service provider to continue operating until the new tender process is completed, seeking to prevent disruption and inconvenience to applicants. The judgment was reserved on July 2 and delivered on July 15.
The ruling covers the outsourcing of Consular, Passport and Visa services, known as CPV services, for Indian missions in Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Singapore.
For Australia, the tender covered services administered through the Indian High Commission in Canberra and consular jurisdictions across the country, including application centres in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.
The High Commission of India declared VFS Global the lowest qualified bidder, or L1 bidder, after financial bids were opened on April 23.
The tender was challenged by E Trav Tech Limited and Verasys Limited, which had been eliminated during the technical assessment after failing to receive the required minimum score of 70 per cent.
Court records show E Trav received 62.2 marks for its Australian proposal, while Verasys received 61.25 marks. Their financial bids were therefore not considered during the final selection process.
E Trav told the court it had quoted a service fee of $38 for the Australian contract, compared with the successful bid of $114.
The court recorded that E Trav’s quoted fee was substantially lower than the successful bidder’s price and said this comparison was not disputed by the government respondents.
A screenshot of VFS Global’s fee calculator supplied to The Australia Today shows a service fee of $115, including GST, for a regular one-year multiple-entry tourist visa application. The calculator separately displays a visa fee of $151 and an Indian Community Welfare Fund fee of $5.
The quoted figures do not mean E Trav was automatically entitled to receive the contract or that applicants would necessarily have paid only $38. The company was still required to satisfy the tender’s technical conditions, and the court did not direct the government to award the contract to either challenger.
Instead, the judges ruled that the process used to assess the technical proposals was legally unsustainable.
The court found bidders were marked using undisclosed comparative standards, received unexplained deductions under measurable criteria and were awarded different scores for materially similar proposals submitted across different countries.
In the Australia tender, E Trav proposed a turnaround time of less than 30 minutes but received no marks under that criterion. The same proposal received five marks in the Singapore and Kuwait assessments.
E Trav also received two marks for its proposed application-submission process in Australia and Kuwait, while an essentially identical proposal received 3.5 marks in the UAE and Singapore.
Its proposal included document pre-check counters, automated queue management, real-time tracking, appointment scheduling, SMS and email notifications, WhatsApp support and an artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot.
The court also examined Verasys’s Australian proposal.
Verasys offered application centre spaces exceeding the prescribed minimum floor areas in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney but received 6.9 out of eight marks.
It also proposed more than the minimum number of counters at some locations but was awarded 4.5 out of six marks without a recorded explanation for the deductions.
The judges said materially identical proposals and supporting documents had received substantially different scores from separate technical evaluation committees.
They rejected the government’s argument that any deficiencies may have been explained during oral presentations, finding that verbal discussions could not replace recorded reasons or justify standards that had not been disclosed to bidders.
“Their absence renders the evaluation opaque and incapable of meaningful scrutiny,” the court said.
The bench found that using undisclosed standards, making unexplained deductions and failing to record reasons struck at the principles of transparency, fairness and equality in public procurement.
It said merely providing numerical scores did not explain why otherwise compliant proposals had been considered deficient.
The court also found the evaluation process breached India’s General Financial Rules and provisions of the tender requiring unsuccessful bidders to be informed of the reasons for their disqualification.
It said the integrity of the assessment process carried wider public importance because excluding a substantially lower-priced bidder through an arbitrary process could lead to the selection of more expensive services.
The court ultimately ruled that the parameter-by-parameter scores given to the petitioners were affected by “arbitrariness, irrationality and lack of transparency” and could not be sustained under Article 14 of the Indian Constitution.
It nullified the technical assessments and the resulting contract awards for all four countries.
The Ministry of External Affairs and the respective Indian missions must now issue fresh tenders for Australia, the UAE, Kuwait and Singapore within one month and make efforts to complete the process at the earliest opportunity.
VFS Global had previously announced that Indian consular, passport and visa services in Australia would be temporarily unavailable from July 1 until further notice.
The latest judgment permits the incumbent providers to continue delivering services until new bidders are selected, but the order does not specify when suspended Australian services or appointments must resume.
Applicants have been advised to monitor official updates from VFS Global, the High Commission of India in Canberra and India’s consulates before visiting an application centre.
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