The government of Bangladesh has operationalized the Public Procurement Act 2006 and the Public Procurement Rules 2008 to establish greater transparency in spending public funds and improve service delivery. The public procurement regime composed of PPA and PPR has addressed the domestic realities as well as best global practices.

Public procurement management has improved significantly due to adherence to the unified law and rules effective since 2008.

The Public procurement is conducted through a process having some important steps which are recognized as the best practices in achieving a greater degree of transparency, efficiency, economy and effectiveness. Most significant steps ensuring transparency are as follows;

1. Public procurement plan at the agency level is taken and made publicity through website much ahead of advertisements for tender notices (Section 11(4) of PPA);
2. Advertisements inviting tenders are published in widely circulated two dailies and CPTU website (Section 40 of PPA), published in DG Market/UN Gallery in case of International Tender);
3. Tenderers are allowed sufficient time(Rule 61(4) of PPR) to prepare and submit their tenders following different thresholds;
4. Clarifications regarding any points of tender conditions are provided to tenderers (Section 45 of PPA) upon their queries;
5. Provision for pre-tender meeting exists and based on the feedbacks of the participating tenderers clauses of tender may also be changed to ensure wider competitions (Section 44 (4) of PPA);
6. Tender is opened publicly while competitive method is followed (Section 47 of PPA)
7. Evaluation is done only on the basis of pre-discussed criteria and documents submitted by the tenderers (Section 48 of PPA).   
8. Tenderers can also lodge complaints if they are aggrieved by any decision of the procuring entity. They can first lodge complaints at the administrative level of the procuring entity and if not satisfied, to the Review Panel at CPTU (Section 29 & 30 of PPA);

9. Contract award information is shared with all contending tenderers (Section 53 of PPA);

10. Tenderer may seek the reasons for not awarding him and PE is obliged to let him know (Rule 37 (4) of PPR;
11. Procuring entity arranges debriefing session for all participating tenderers after the award where explanation for award and limitations of others are given so that they can overcome in their next attempts.      

The above steps are followed to ensure transparency and accountability in the process of public procurement which the GoB has now transformed into a digital domain, ICT based procurement process called e-GP. The digitization has further increased competition, efficiency and removed physical obstructions in the processing of public procurement.

The Central Procurement Technical Unit of Implementation Monitoring and Evaluation Division (IMED), Ministry of Planning, started piloting of electronic government procurement (e-GP) in 2011 in four target agencies.

The agencies are Bangladesh Water Development Board, Bangladesh Rural Electrification Board, Local Government and Engineering Department and Roads and Highways Department.

Building on the successful piloting, e-GP was rolled out to other agencies in 2012. Since then e-GP has seen an exponential growth both in terms of value and volume.

Until May 9, 2017 as many as 1081 out of about 1300 procuring agencies (PAs) were registered.  The rest are set to get connected soon. The broad modules of e-GP are Procurement Planning, e-Tendering, e-Contract management & e-Performance Management 

Up to May 9, 2017, a total of 32,528 tenderers registered with the e-GP system. More than 95,350 tenders were invited through e-GP system. The total estimated value of such tenders is overTK 84,037 crore.

As per a government decision CPTU is connecting all PAs to e-GP and giving them necessary training for e-GP operation.

The electronic government procurement has been introduced as per 65(1) of the Public Procurement Act 2006.

New wider capacity data centre has been established at the Bangladesh Computer Council and CPTU. The new data centre has a storage capacity of 200 terabyte.

A 24-hour/7 Help Desk is working at CPTU. A mobile app on public procurement is also functioning for viewing e-GP tender notices and contacting e-GP help desk and CPTU. 

Piloting of citizen engagement in public procurement has also been done which provided positive results. The CPTU is now preparing for scaling up the citizen engagement for external oversight by the citizen groups at the local level.