Haryana Govt blacklists SBI Life Insurance Company

By Haryananewswire

CHANDIGARH, JAN 29

The Haryana Government has black listed   M/s SBI Life Insurance Company Limited and debarred it for a period of three years from  doing any further business  with the State Government  or any of its Departments, Public Sector Undertakings or autonomous bodies  for intentionally delaying the entire process of distribution of annuity to the land owners and failure to carry out its commitments.

        While giving this information here today, an official spokesman of the Finance Department said that the Government withdrew and cancelled the bid awarded to it for delaying the entire process of distribution of annuity to the land owners under the Resettlement and Rehabilitation (R&R) Policy of the State Government.

He said that an expression of interest (EOI) was issued in February, 2011 inviting bids from Insurance Companies or banks for purposes of providing services for disbursement of annuity to the land owners under R&R policy of the State Government. Bid-cum-tender document were submitted by M/s SBI Life insurance Company Limited,  the Notice, on  March 31, 2011. He said that after receipt of the bid documents, several rounds of negotiations and discussions were held between the notice and the Government with respect to various stipulations and conditions stated in the draft Service Level Agreement including the obligation of the noticee as service provider with respect to collection and validation of data of the beneficiaries under the scheme of annuity.

He said that the decision was thus taken by the Government on  July 25,  2011 and August 11, 2011  for making payment of annuity under R&R policy by allocation of work amongst the selected insurance companies and Letter of Intent (LOI) was issued to noticee  on September 6,  2011. The said LOI was also issued on specific and unambiguous stipulation that the LOI would be subject to execution of Service Level Agreement (SLA).This was expressly communicated to the noticee that the Government reserved its right to withdraw the said LOI in the event of failure of noticee to execute the Service Level Agreement, he added.

He said that the State Government in performance of its obligation as expressed under the LOI duly advanced payment in favour of noticee towards 50 per cent purchase consideration and allocated area of operation to the noticee. The noticee accepted the said advance payment knowing fully well that the Government has rejected its repeated requests for a change in the fundamentals of the EOI that is collection and validation of data. Thus, in so far as the Government was concerned, the issue relating to data was resolved, and the noticee had accepted the said condition of collection and validation of data, he further added.

He said that in furtherance of the agreed and accepted condition of LOI, the Government vide its letter dated January 4,  2012 forwarded the SLA duly approved by it and called upon the noticee to sign the same with its concerned departments. However, despite repeated reminders, including ones dated  January 27, 2012 and  February 3,  2012, for execution of the SLA, the noticee failed to execute the same inter alia again for the same frivolous reasons of non deletion of the clause relating to the collection and validation of data. He said that the said objections of the noticee were never accepted by the Government as the same were considered to be the primary task given to service provider and of which noticee was duly informed too.

The spokesman said that the conduct, as above of noticee, of refusing to execute the SLA defeated a very laudable policy of the Government undertaken to realize the pious constitutional aim of public good.