Nomination basis
Also called: Nomination route, Single-source award · Topic: Industrial Policy, Public Sector, MSMEs and Disinvestment · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
Nomination basis means the government gives a project straight to an agency it picks, usually a public sector firm, without competitive bidding. In competitive bidding, several firms make offers and the best one wins. Nomination saves time and keeps sensitive work with a trusted state agency. Without rival bidders, though, nobody pushes the price down, and the chosen agency often faces weak penalties when it is late or does poor work. That is why the contract terms matter so much.
Example
The first phase of the mobile-tower project in Left Wing Extremism (LWE) areas was paid for by the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF). It went to BSNL on nomination basis. The plan was for 1,836 sites, at a final cost of about ₹4,214 crore. The agreement was due by September 2013 but was signed only in September 2014. In April–September 2017, only about 19.56% of the 1,831 sites met the 98% uptime benchmark, which is the share of time a tower should actually be working.
Don't confuse with
- Competitive bidding (tendering): the work goes to the best offer among several bidders. Under nomination, the government picks the agency in advance and there is no contest.
- Auction: an open sale of a scarce resource to the highest bidder, such as spectrum or coal blocks. Courts cancelled 2G spectrum licences in 2012 and coal blocks in 2014 because they had been allocated at the government's discretion. Both rulings pushed allocation towards auctions.