Centralized bid evaluation for awarding of construction projects – A case of India government

Reviewing the procedures of contractor selection in government departments in various countries and in the Rural Development Department (RDD) in India, this paper brings out several weaknesses of the current contractor selection procedure. It suggests a centralized contractor evaluation process with the inclusion of three new selection attributes along bid price. The suggested attributes are: (1) time quoted to complete the project, (2) warranty period quoted, and (3) past performance score of the contractor. To solve the resulting multi-objective decision-making problem, the paper proposes a binary goal programming model. When tested with the existing contractor selection procedure for six past projects in RDD, the model yields the same results as those taken by RDD in the past, confirming the credibility of the model. When tested with the suggested procedure, the model yields much superior results.