‘Silence and Opacity’: Delhi HC sets aside Rs 95 cr contract for providing guards at protected sites

CISS Services Ltd, which provides security solutions, had moved Delhi HC, seeking quashing of the work orders issued to another agency — SIS Limited — for providing 1,306 unarmed security guards at the monuments of national heritage.

The tenders were issued in July 2024, which received 76 bids, and in December 2024, technical bids were opened, where 75 of the 76 bidders, including CISS Services, were disqualified. The only bidder remaining was SIS Limited and it was awarded the contract in March 2025. The prior round of the government’s contract was with SIS Limited.

SIS Limited was founded by Ravindra Kishore Sinha, who is also its group chairman. Elected to Rajya Sabha from Bihar in 2014 as a BJP member, former journalist Sinha’s SIS found its links to two offshore entities in the Paradise Papers investigation in 2017.

The bid document outlined that bidders required past experience in similar services to any central/state government organisation/public sector undertaking. In this regard, to exemplify its prior experience, CISS Services had referred to being a service provider to SBI. The government authority had however taken objection to the same on the ground that the SBI had engaged the firm for execution of “caretaker services” and not “security services”, and thus the same would not qualify as experience in similar services.

In an order dated August 1, a bench of Chief Justice D K Upadhyaya and Justice Anish Dayal, setting aside the work contracts and directing for a fresh tendering, noted that the services that ministry had outlined in the tender and the scope of “caretaking services” in SBI were “substantially similar” with “only the context that changes i.e. from an ATM to a monument”.

“It is quite clear that there was no cogent/clear reasoning which was furnished and merely a decision was handed down by means of the cryptic paragraph… There is total silence and opacity in the manner in which the authority arrived at this decision,” the bench further recorded, while holding the tendering authority’s decision as “arbitrary and unreasonable”.