You must have heard of the joke about a space scientist who when asked about the most amazing thing about his space travel replied, "I wonder at times that we could accomplish all this with most of the parts procured using L-1 concept."
L-1 or the 'lowest bidder gets the job' concept has its own advantages like curbing corruption, getting competitive prices and ensuring transparency and fairness. Naysayers, on the other hand are of the view that if you give peanuts, you will get only monkeys.
Let me share with you an example where we made a new discovery through L-1 concept. Actually we were asked to get a 10-page document translated to a foreign non-English language on a most urgent basis. We had never got translation done in that language. So we googled details of a few agencies and sent them emails and followed up with calls. We received the quotations and we noticed that average price was coming to be around INR 2 Lakh. However, one agency had quoted almost half of that price. We presumed that the agency might be undercutting and would do a poor quality job. When the agency enquired, we informed them of our view. They strongly refuted the assumption and assured of a professional good quality job at that price.
When we shared our apprehensions about their price being half of other bidders, they were not forthcoming about the logic. After prolonged deliberations, when pressed on as we wanted job done urgently, and lower cost was an added advantage, they disclosed. They realized that we could not take risk of undercutting and poor quality job, and they had to explain the logic. What they told was indeed revealing. They had a special software which enabled them to charge for one word only once, even if that word occured many times in the document. That is why their cost was so low.
Now I hope you agree that L-1 concept is not always bad and there are wonderful instances like this.
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