Recommendations and Way Forward

Based on the learnings from the first cycle of Annual Awards in Excellence in National Highways and Toll
Plazas 2018, some of the key recommendations are as follows:

1. Application Portal: In order to ensure more efficient and user-friendly portal, changes that can be
made in the portal are:
a. “Edit Application” & “Save my application and come back to it later” option: This option
will enable vendors to save their application and submit it later. In this first cycle of
awards, multiple applications were received for the same project due to non-availability
of edit application option. This led to additional time and effort at the back-end for
screening the applications.
b. Mandatory documents: It is crucial that necessary documents are uploaded to
substantiate claims made by the vendor. Hence documents should be made mandatory
to upload to avoid false claims.
c. Option of declaration in case of absence of documents: In the first cycle of awards, in the
case of non-availability of documents to support a claim, a declaration was sought from
the concerned officials during the field assessment. For some parameters like penalties
and unusual occurrences, a vendor could not provide supporting documents for the
absence of penalties, hence, a declaration format can be uploaded on the portal which
can be provided after authorisation by AE/IE to support the claim.
d. Documents nomenclature to be more appropriate: In order to avoid confusion and
provide clarity for the assessors, proper names should be given to the files and suitable
instructions for the same should be written at the portal.
e. Option of giving remarks for the nominee: A remarks option should be given to the
vendors in case they want to provide additional inputs for some parameters. For example:
If providing a certain item is not in the vendor agreement, vendor will be able to mention
it in the remarks.
f. Clear instructions for documents to be uploaded: It was observed that irrelevant
documents were provided by the vendor, hence clear instructions should be mentioned
to help the vendors to understand the relevant documents required. For example: In the
question where the milestone dates were required, vendors had uploaded their letter
intimating the AE/IE about completion of the milestone whereas they were supposed to
upload the letter by AE/IE approving of completion of the milestone. Hence the
documents were rejected, and vendors were given 0 score for it.
g. Server capacity:
h. Provision of Scoring on the portal: If the portal is improvised to include the scoring rubric
used for the desktop assessment round and provide an option for the assessor to conduct
the desktop assessment round on the portal, the time and effort taken to complete the
assessment cycle can be reduced to a greater extent.
i. Improvise the back-end portal: Add column on the back end for project name:
j. Improving user interface and alignment of text with document proof options
k. Adding sections in the awards page: Important information on the nomination process,
eligibility criterion, judging criterion and winners on last cycle of the awards should be
included on the portal.