Delhi, July 29:

The World Bank has come under fire after it was revealed that Indian civil servants were repeatedly overruled by bank officials in their choice of consultants for a multi-million dollar contract to plan the privatisation of Delhi’s water supply. Documents obtained under Delhi’s freedom of information act show the bank intervened to benefit of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which had failed to make the grade when the Delhi government put out the tender in 1998. The contract was to produce a plan to privatise Delhi’s water supply, which provides a spluttering service to 1.6 million households in a city of 20 million people. It was eventually won by PwC in the teeth of opposition from Delhi’s government officials, who constantly ranked it below other bids.

Campaigners say PwC’s “blueprint for reform’’ closely mirrors other water privatisations funded by the World Bank. A number of these have failed to deliver promised benefits,

notably in Manila and South America. Arvind Kejriwal of Parivartan, an anti-corruption group which obtained the documents, accused the World Bank of dictating terms and exercising undue influence over an accountable body. The correspondence between the Delhi Jal Board, which oversees water supply in the Indian capital, and World Bank officials shows that PwC lost three times to rivals during the bidding process. It did not even make a shortlist until bank officials insisted that “at least one consultant should be shortlisted from a developing country’’. PwC is a multinational firm but has an Indian subsidiary registered in Calcutta.

Papers show that in the second round of bidding, PwC came fifth out of six consultants and again failed to qualify. The World Bank response was to modify the criteria for evaluation and to ask for an “explanation of what exactly are PWC’s shortcomings’’.

Civil servants wrote that the “project could be in jeopardy if the suggestion of the World Bank were not agreed to’’. PwC was reinstated with higher marks. In the next round, PwC again failed but was allowed to make the cut after the World Bank chose to ignore an expert who had had serious reservations about the firm’s expertise. The company clinched the $2 million contract in 2001. Last night the World Bank said the events “were broadly correct but the interpretation put on them is not’’. “There has been no firm favoured or discriminated against in the Delhi scheme,’’ said its operations adviser in India, Rachid Benmassaoud.