DHAKA, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh is making transformational shift to its public procurement environment with exponential growth of electronic government procurement, known as e-GP.
It covers four key government agencies: Roads and Highways Department, Local Government Engineering Department, Bangladesh Rural Electrification Board, and Bangladesh Water Development Board.
"The agencies together invited over 55,000 tenders online up to May 2016, up from 8,000 in June 2014, the corresponding value increase is to 5 billion U.S. dollars from 700 million U.S. dollars in the same period," the World Bank said in a statement on Thursday.
These agencies together spend about half of the country's annual development budget, it said, adding that the agencies are also monitoring procurement performance online.
In the last two years, the tender invitations through e-GP in these four agencies increased by seven times, said the Washington-based lender.
In addition to making public contracting more accessible, secure, efficient and transparent, it said the electronic procurement is significantly reducing collusive bidding practices at the local levels.
E-GP has made doing business easier, and reduced the transaction costs for both the procuring agencies and the bidding community. In addition, the system is becoming self-sustainable with its own generated revues, the World Bank said.
A joint World Bank-Government team recently reviewed the project progress and noted the Bangladeshi government's high commitment contributing to more transparency and competitiveness of the public procurement system.
The World Bank also said to keep up pace with the fast growth of e-GP, the Central Procurement Technical Unit needs strengthening further in terms of capacity and e-GP as a business service provider.
The World Bank's total support to the project is 68.10 million U.S. dollars which includes a 10-million-U.S. dollar additional financing to project approved on Monday.
