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NEW DELHI: In what appears to be another scam in the railways, officials inflated the requirement of coaches for 2013-14 and then came out with “tailor-made” criteria to favour a particular private company.Documents with TOI suggest that officials in the Railway Board justified the requirement of 500 GS (general second-class) coaches to be procured from public sector unit BEML and ‘other sources’ under the coach production programme for 2013-14.This was in addition to the demand of 1,150-1,200 coaches being met by railway undertakings such as the Integral Coach Factory and Rail Coach Factory (Kapurthala and Rae Bareli) for the same year.In June 2013, railways invited tenders from private players for the additional 500 GS coaches at an expected cost of around Rs 250 crore. The tender process is still to be finalized.The order raised eyebrows in railways as procurement was being sought from private parties that had never manufactured GS coaches even as the manufacturing capacity of departmental units — ICF and RCF — was still to be exhausted.A senior railways official told TOI that many posts and positions in newly set up Rai Bareli coach factory were not made operational on the plea that there weren’t enough production orders.TOI has found that the tender conditions were tailor-made to suit a Kolkata-based private company and specifications were inserted to cut out competition.The shortlisted company has never produced or supplied GS coaches. Yet it was chosen because the tender document broadened the criteria to include manufacturing experience of other coaches. The tender state, “Bulk orders will be done from established manufacturers…who have successfully executed order of main line passenger coaches/EMU/MEMU/DEMU and should have been in operation for at least two years with satisfactory performance.”Once the precedent was set, railways again decided to procure 169 coaches from ‘other sources’ for the current year (2014-15).A BSP MP has written to railway minister Sadananda Gowda, alleging a scam in the tender process. He said that the quantity of the purchase order, around 500 coaches, was inflated, and that a West Bengal-based company was being favoured.