News
ePassport personalisation: Bid deadline extended again
View(s):The Department of Immigration and Emigration (DIE) has granted a second extension to bidders for its tender to personalise ePassports.
This is not due to a lack of interest but rather because of an overwhelming number of parties vying for the Rs. 5.5 billion contract, official sources said.
The successful bidder must implement a two-key encryption solution that will allow the Sri Lankan passport’s unique public key infrastructure (PKI) to be lodged with the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s (ICAO) public key directory (PKD) for access by immigration authorities worldwide.
Bids will now close on July 30. The first deadline of June 23 was extended to July 23. A pre-bid meeting was held at which a large number of questions from prospective bidders were answered.
However, the tender continued to attract queries. A few bid conditions have changed, and the date for submissions was delayed twice. The latest set of clarifications by the DIE runs into 15 pages.
For instance, the original requirement was for the bidder to have delivered or have in operation at least two ePassport personalisation solutions supported by reference letters; the minimum value of each project must not be less than US$15 million, and the projects must have been completed or operational within the last five years prior to the bid submission deadline. This has been amended to one ePassport personalisation solution with a minimum value of not US$15 million but US$10 million.
A separate procurement for ePassport books was won by Thales DIS Finland OY and its Sri Lankan partner, Just In Time (JIT) Technologies (Pvt) Ltd. But 1,850,000 of that order is being delivered as ordinary machine-readable passports (MRPs) to tide over a severe shortage of travel documents caused by the tender being bungled.
The personalisation (PKI-PKD) solution was advertised as a separate procurement and is still open. Some consignments of MRPs are due to be delivered before the ePassports start arriving.
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