New Delhi: Delhi govt‘s Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS) project, aimed at overhauling and digitising its financial processes, has failed to attract any bidders despite receiving approval more than seven months ago.The proposal for the IFMS project was approved by Delhi govt in Dec last year, following which the finance department floated the request for proposal in Jan. However, despite extending the bid submission deadline four times, the department did not receive any bids, officials said.“The issue was discussed during a recent meeting chaired by chief minister Rekha Gupta, where feedback received by the department from stakeholders during consultations and meetings of the technical advisory committee was reviewed. During these consultations, prospective bidders flagged technical, operational and implementation-related issues in the original tender that discouraged participation. Based on these discussions, the finance department proposed several modifications to the tender conditions, all of which were approved by the competent authority,” an official said.The official said that, among the key changes, the project title has been expanded from “Design, Development, Implementation, Operations and Maintenance of IFMS” to “Design, Provisioning, Customization, Configuration, Development, Implementation, Operations and Maintenance of IFMS”. The revised scope allows for the possibility of implementing the system using a commercial off-the-shelf platform in addition to custom development.Delhi govt has also approved changes to the hosting framework. Instead of mandating a virtual private cloud environment, IFMS will now be hosted in accordance with the ministry of electronics and information technology’s cloud selection framework, after officials noted that a virtual private cloud is not recommended for treasury functions under the existing guidelines.
