IN THE HIGH COURT OF BOMBAY AT GOA
WRIT PETITION NO.480 OF 2026
(CORAM :VALMIKI MENEZES & HITEN S. VENEGAVKAR, JJ)
Reserved on : 22nd June 2026 Pronounced on : 25th June 2026.
Agravanshi Private Limited, A Private Company … Petitioner
Versus
The State of Goa & Ors. … Respondents
A) The Constitution of India – Article 226 – No scope of judicial review under Article 226 of the Constitution of India where, the Petitioner has not discharged the initial burden of establishing a public law infirmity in the auction process which can be said to be sufficient to justify a writ direction to reopen, resume or cancel a concluded E-Auction process.
HELD
Where the entire relief sought is to invalidate or reopen a concluded auction on the ground that the auction platform failed, the initial burden lies on the Petitioner to place before the Court credible technical material showing that the fault was not at its end and that the failure was attributable to the service provider or the auction portal ( Para 32).
In the present case, the Petitioner has failed to discharge the initial burden resting upon it to establish, even prima facie, that the alleged disruption emanated from the MSTC platform itself and not from circumstances attributable to its own technological infrastructure. There is a complete absence of evidence indicating that any other bidder participating in the auction suffered an identical impediment. There is equally no material suggesting that Respondent no.4 was accorded any preferential treatment or that its bid was accepted otherwise than in accordance with the prescribed procedure. In the absence of any pleadings or proof of fraud, mala fides, bias, collusion, favouritism or procedural impropriety, and in the absence of any demonstrable infraction of the tender conditions, the State’s decision to act upon the auction outcome cannot be characterised as arbitrary, irrational or perverse. The Petitioner has, therefore, failed to make out a case falling within the narrow and well-settled parameters of judicial review governing contractual and E-Auction matters.
B) In judicial review, the Court cannot convert screenshots from its own computer into a definitive finding of server-side failure and come to a prima facie opinion warranting judicial review of a finally concluded E-Auction Process and decision.
HELD
The Petitioner’s entire case rests on screenshots and a screen recording from its own computer. Those screenshots may show that the Petitioner’s browser encountered a timeout or page unresponsive error. They do not, by themselves, establish that MSTC’s server or portal had failed. Browser timeout, page unresponsive and connection timeout errors may be caused by multiple factors, including local device load, browser state, DNS resolution, firewall, VPN, router, internet service provider, local network instability, intermittent routing failure, or server-side non-response. A screenshot of the error is proof of the error displayed to the user; it is not proof of the technical cause of that error.
The decisive question in every case remains whether the process is shown to be arbitrary, mala fide, discriminatory, fraudulent, irrational or contrary to the governing tender conditions. That standard is not met in the present petition.
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