Panaji: The high court of Bombay at Goa on Thursday allowed Goa govt to complete the e-auction process for the Cavrem-Maina mineral block, rejecting a challenge by Agravanshi Pvt Ltd, which alleged it was unable to place its final bid due to a technical failure on the auction portal.The petition challenged the auction of Cavrem-Maina mineral block No. XVIII conducted through the MSTC e-auction portal on May 12 this year. Agravanshi contended that a technical glitch during the final phase of bidding prevented it from submitting an improved final price offer after another bidder quoted 88.8%, resulting in the latter being declared the successful bidder.A division bench comprising Justice Valmiki Menezes and Justice Hiten Venegavkar held that the petitioner had failed to establish grounds for judicial intervention.“The petitioner’s entire case rests on screenshots and a screen recording from its own computer. While these may show that its browser encountered a timeout or page-unresponsive error, they do not establish that MSTC’s server or portal had failed,” the court observed.The bench noted that such errors could arise from several factors. A screenshot, it said, only proves that an error message appeared to the user and not the cause of the error.The court clarified that it was not laying down an absolute rule against intervention in e-auction disputes involving technical failures. It said courts may step in where there is evidence of service-provider failure, manipulation, denial of equal opportunity, arbitrary conduct, suppression of logs, mala fides, or multiple contemporaneous complaints from similarly placed bidders.However, it held that such jurisdiction is exceptional and cannot be invoked solely based on a bidder’s unsupported claim of inability to submit a bid, particularly when contemporaneous records indicate normal portal activity.
