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 A joint workshop on ‘Competition Law and Public Procurement’ was organised by the World Bank supported U.P Procurement observatory at Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow on November 28th, 2015. The workshop was inaugurated by Mr. Ashok Chawla (Chairman, Competition Commission of India (CCI)).
Around 70 delegates including participants from UNICEF, World Bank, CCI, UP  Government and several PSUs attended the workshop. The deliberations in the workshop ranged from understanding competition in public procurement, its journey and concerns to World Bank’s initiatives for improving competition in public procurement. A detailed presentation was also made on the public procurement process visualisation tool developed by the observatory.
Dialogues and discussion on topics ranging from understanding competition in  Public Procurement as well as the World Bank’s initiatives for improving competition in Public Procurement were done at the workshop. Sameer Srivastava, Professor at IIM Lucknow said that the Public procurement observatory was established in 2013 to look into Public Procurement and advocate better practices for enhancing Public Procurement in Uttar Pradesh. “The observatory also pursues qualitative and quantitative analysis of Public Procurement across various states and shares it with government officers and citizens through a portal, blogs, tweets, newsletters, workshops and training sessions. By observing procurement processes and advocating better procurement practices, it aims to encourage significant savings in Public Procurement”, he said.
He also mentioned that the observatory had developed various key  performance indicators (KPIs) to understand and benchmark the public procurement across eight Indian states. It has also developed a process visualisation tool to help users better understand procurement process on various KPIs. He stated that the observatory is also working towards developing a collaborative network of public procurement experts from within India as well as across the globe and is exploring partnerships with leading institutions such as the University of Hull (UK) University of Cincinnati (USA) for open discussion and collaboration on competition in public procurement, open data sharing and information federalism, he added.
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