Thaindian News

Kathmandu, April 7 (IANS) The growing controversy in Nepal following the government’s decision to award a sensitive passport contract to an Indian company continued to snowball with two individuals now challenging the decision in court.
Lawyer Hem Mani Subedi and law student Nar Bahadur KC filed separate public interest litigation applications in Nepal’s Supreme Court Tuesday, asking it to scrap the deal signed between the coalition government and the state-owned Security Printing and Minting Corp of India to print new Nepali passports.

They said the contract was “illegal” and compromised Nepal’s security.

The petitioners have filed the writs against Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, the cabinet secretariat, Foreign Minister Sujata Koirala, the foreign ministry, the immigration department and the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority.

The trouble started in January after the foreign ministry cancelled a bidding process started in 2004.

Nepal had floated a global tender to print three million modern machine-readable passports that are to replace the current handwritten ones in order to conform to the norms laid down by the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

Four foreign companies were shortlisted but the process dragged on due to protracted political crises in Nepal and the fall of at least four governments.

In January this year, Foreign Minister Sujata Koirala, who is also the deputy prime minister, persuaded the government to cancel the bidding process on the ground it would take too long and Nepal would fail to meet the April 1 deadline for the new passports.

She proposed the Indian company, saying it would execute the job quickly due to the close diplomatic ties between India and Nepal.

However, a team of MPs, who form the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, asked the government twice not to hand over the contract to India, saying the Indian bid was higher than the others and would also jeopardise Nepal’s diplomatic position as well as security.

“The contract was given to the Indian company illegally in violation of the Procurement Act,” former finance minister Prakash Chandra Lohani, who is also a member of the committee, told IANS. “It was not as if India had sought the contract. The foreign minister chose to give it to the Indian company.

“Now a company from neighbouring country China has also made an offer at a lower rate, putting Nepal in an embarrassing mess.”

The parliamentary committee Monday summoned the prime minister for an explanation and found it unsatisfactory, Lohani said.

“It is also an issue of the government defying parliament,” he said. “The committee has decided to meet Wednesday to decide its next course of action.”

Now the two petitioners have alleged in their applications that the government may have given the contract to the Indian company after receiving kickbacks.

Nepal’s biggest party, the Maoists, are also opposing the deal.

Maoist chief and former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda said at a public rally Tuesday that the contract to India would jeopardise Nepal’s security. It also showed the blatant disregard the government had for parliament, which represented the people, Dahal said.

The Indian company was to have delivered about three million new Nepali passports within the next three years, starting from June.

To tide over till then, the government had said it would issue handwritten passports that would be valid for five years only instead of 10.