Some procurement facts let anyone check whether public competition was real: not just who won and how much, but whether competition was even attempted, who really controls the winner, and why a contract went uncontested. India's data publishes the basics well. A mature reference standard, the US federal system, publishes more. This page compares what each system discloses, not who is more honest and not who competes more.
Each row is a fact that, if published, lets an outsider verify competition without trusting anyone. "India" is what the public CPPP and state-portal records expose; "US reference" is the FPDS / USAspending federal standard, shown as proof that publishing the field is feasible, not as a scoreboard.
| Published field | What it lets you check | India | US reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Winning vendor | Who received the money | published | published |
| Contract value | How much it was worth | often blank | published |
| Number of bids / offers | Whether anyone else turned up | published | published |
| Buying organisation | Who awarded the contract | published | published |
| Bidding window dates | Whether rivals had time to respond | published | published |
| Vendor address | Where the winner is based | published | published |
| Competed vs sole-source | Whether competition was even attempted | inferred | published |
| Reason competition was limited | Why a contract went uncontested | not published | published |
| Winner's parent company | Who actually controls the winner | inferred | published |
| Stable vendor ID | Track one vendor across many contracts | name only | published |
| Standardised category code | Compare like-for-like across buyers | free text | published |
This is not a one-sided ledger. India publishes bid counts and named winners at national scale, across millions of awards and fifteen years, which many far richer countries still do not. The basics that NITI Scope's competition and integrity work rests on, single-bid rates, short bidding windows, value bunching, are all there in the public record. The gap is not the basics; it is the context that turns a flag into a finding.
Single-bid procurement is not an India-specific concern - it is the standard early-warning indicator of weak competition everywhere. The EU publishes an official single-bidder rate for every member state and flags anything above 20% as unsatisfactory; the US GAO has run the same analysis on federal contracts. Below are the published figures next to ours. This is context, not a league table - each system counts a different slice of its procurement, so the bars are not directly comparable (see the notes).
¹ India: share of all 3.12M unique awards carrying a bid count (deduplicated - see methodology) that drew exactly one bid, 2011-2026, every
contract size, from this site's data. Corners of it run far higher - Power/Energy alone is 47%.
² US: share of competed federal contracts that received only one offer, FY2015 - the most recent
government-wide analysis, from
GAO-17-244SP.
³ EU: official single-bidder indicator, 2024, from the
EU Single Market Scoreboard - above-EU-threshold procedures only
(large contracts, where single bidding is more common), excluding framework agreements and direct awards.
Member states we checked range from 20% (Germany) to 56% (Poland).
Why India's bar being lowest is not a victory lap: the EU figure counts only large contracts and excludes direct awards; India's counts everything, including millions of small purchases where competition is easier. Put on the EU's own traffic-light scale (green ≤ 10%, red > 20%), India's 12.6% is amber - and its biggest spending sectors would be deep red.
Three NITI Scope features exist only because the source does not publish a field that a fuller standard does:
India does not label a contract sole-source, so we use a single bid as a proxy for "no real competition". A published competed-versus-sole-source field would make that exact instead of a careful inference.
There is no parent company or stable company ID in the awards, so the Corporate Networks feature reconstructs control by matching vendor names to the company registry. A published parent ID would remove the guesswork.
The point is not that one country is cleaner. It is that the extra fields are feasible to publish, a large federal system already does, and publishing them would let anyone check Indian procurement directly rather than relying on inference.
The "often blank" contract-value cell in the table above is not spread evenly - it is concentrated almost entirely in one company. Across 3.17M unique awards with full detail, only 5.8% are published without any contract value. 96.5% of those value-less records come from units of a single public-sector company, BHEL, which files awards on the central portal with the value field set to zero. Share of award records published without a value, for buyers with 5,000+ awards:
Computed from the full deduplicated corpus (3.17M unique awards carrying a detail record; records without one are excluded). The awards and their bid counts are real - only the money field is zeroed. It is unit-level practice, not company policy: BHEL's R&D division publishes values, and Trichy does for a fifth of its records. Which means the fix is simple: one reporting change at one company would close about 97% of India's contract-value gap. That is the practical case this whole page makes - most of the distance to full disclosure is organisational habit, not law.
How much money is behind the zeros? BHEL's own accounts give the scale: revenue of over Rs 27,000 crore in FY2024-25, with cost of materials consumed of about Rs 4,900 crore in Q3 FY25 alone (annual report). On that run-rate, the zeroed award records plausibly conceal purchasing on the order of Rs 15,000+ crore a year - an inference from published accounts, not from the award records themselves, which is exactly the problem. The vendors are visible; the money is not.
A comparison of disclosure standards and of how widely one warning light is tracked - not of honesty or value for money. India's records come from a third-party scrape of CPPP and state portals; the US reference is the FPDS / USAspending federal standard; the EU figures are the official Scoreboard indicator. Different legal regimes publish different things for different reasons, and a field marked "published" can still be incomplete in places (India's detail records have a known coverage gap; reference fields can be left blank too). The single-bid rates above share a definition in spirit but not in scope - each system counts a different slice of its procurement - which is why we annotate every figure with its source and coverage instead of ranking anyone. See methodology.