Must an eligibility condition in a tender be read against the subject-matter of the tender itself, not in the abstract?

Paragraph 25Clause 9(c)(a) of the Board's instructions required a bidder to furnish completion certificate(s) evidencing "successful execution of annual collecting User Charges/Parking Fees work" in Government, Semi-Government or PSU organisations, for the last two years up to 31.12.2025”. This condition cannot be read in the abstract. It has to be read against the subject-matter of the tender itself, which is the collection, on behalf of a public market committee, of user charges from a high volume of retail and commercial vehicles entering Mandi premises on a daily basis, over a twelve-month contract period, for a consideration exceeding Rs.16 crores. A contract of this description calls for demonstrated competence in gate management, ticketing or token systems, cash handling and daily reconciliation, accounting to the authority, and supervision of collection staff across an entire working year, a specialised, continuous, revenue-facing operation in which the collection of user charges is not incidental to some other engagement, but is itself the bidder's principal contractual obligation to the authority that appoints it.

Paragraph 26Organising a cattle fair is a fundamentally different undertaking. Under the Punjab Cattle Fairs (Regulation) Rules, 1968, the sites required for commercial or other purposes in connection with a cattle fair are allotted by the fair officer by auction, and Rule 6(1) requires the successful bidder to pay the full amount of the rent offered at the fall of the hammer. The organiser of a cattle fair is, in other words, a lessee who pays the authority for the privilege of using the fairground for the duration of the fair; he is not an agent appointed by a public body to collect, account for and remit a statutory user charge on its behalf. That such an organiser may, in the course of running the fair, himself levy some charge on those who park vehicles or set up stalls within the fair ground is not disputed; but that charge is levied by him for his own account, as an incident of a wholly different commercial arrangement, the temporary lease of fair-ground space, and not in the discharge of a specialised contractual duty owed to, and monitored by, a public authority of the kind that Clause 9(c)(a) contemplates.