India’s public procurement portal Government e-Marketplace (GeM) has facilitated sales of around Rs 3 trillion so far in the current financial year, which suggests that it will surpass last year’s performance by a wide margin.
In 2023-24 the portal handled procurement of Rs 4 trillion by the government departments in both centre and states, and public sector enterprises. In last financial year the gross merchandise value of transactions on the portal had doubled on year.
Since the start of operations in 2017-18 the GeM has enabled transactions of close to Rs 11 trillion, a senior official said.
The GeM started offering services to its clients from 2021 and since then the total value of services procured using the portal has crossed Rs 4.84 trillion. Procurement of services through GeM was Rs 1.73 trillion in the first seven months of this financial year.
In October the GeM signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Sikkim to facilitate procurement by the state on the platform. “That covers all the states under GeM,” the official said. Apart from the big government agencies, the GeM has also onboarded panchayats and cooperatives.
The procurement by the central organisations on the portal in October stood at around Rs 30,264 crore. About 27 bids were awarded with a value of over Rs 100 crore.
The official said that since inception more than 9.7 lakh micro, small and medium enterprises have registered on GeM, receiving orders of over Rs 4.19 lakh crore or around 40% of the total. About 27,196 startups registered on the portal have processed orders worth Rs 29,412 crore. On GeM 1.69 lakh women led medium and small enterprises have processed over 23 lakh orders worth Rs 41,126 crore.
GeM is the third largest public procurement platform in the world. The biggest is South Korea’s KONEPS followed by Singapore’s GeBIZ. According to estimates governments around the world spend $ 13 trillion every year accounting for 13-22% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In developing countries this could be 15-22% of GDP.