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"6. Condition No. 2 of Special Conditions of Contract may be extracted. It reads:

"2. The earnest money shall be forfeited on the following grounds:

(a) On revocation of the tender or,

(b) On refusal to enter into a Contract afterward to a Contractor or, .

(c) If the work is not commenced after the work is awarded to a Contractor."

A plain reading of the above would show that one of the Special Conditions of Contract, subject to which the intending bidders could submit their bids, was that the earnest money accompanying the bid shall be forfeited in any one of the three contingencies referred to in Condition No. 2 (supra). One of these contingencies was revocation of the tender, which would in the context in which the special provision is made imply any withdrawal of the bid/tender by the bidder concerned.

7. The High Court appears to have confused revocation of the tender with revocation of the tender notice. The expression "revocation of tender" does not obviously refer to revocation by the appellant- corporation, who had issued the tender notice. There is a clear difference between revocation of a 'tender' and revocation of the 'tender notice'. While revocation of the tender notice is the prerogative of the appellant- corporation, revocation of the 'tender' could be only by the bidder/tenderer concerned. The expression "revocation" may have been loosely used by the corporation, but, in the context in which the same appears in the Special Conditions of Contract only means withdrawal/cancellation/ recall of the bid or tender submitted by the bidder. In any such event, the earnest money deposited by the bidder would be liable to the forfeited is the plain and the simple meaning of the Condition No. 2 extracted above. The High Court was in manifest error in holding that the forfeiture did not fall within the purview of Condition No. 2.