Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has been selected by the Centre to upgrade the Government e-Marketplace (GeM), a platform that facilitates online purchases of goods and services by the central government departments and ministries.
The IT major’s will transform GeM into a state-of-the-art public procurement platform to accommodate the anticipated six-fold growth in gross merchandise value (GMV) over the next six years, said the company in a filing with BSE.
The commerce ministry launched GeM in 2016 and awarded a five-year contract in 2018 to a private consortium, including Intellect Design Arena and Infibeam, for the development and maintenance of the platform. The contract is set to expire this year.
However, Infibeam, in an investor presentation document filed with the BSE, on Tuesday said that current GeM contract will “potentially” continue for 18-24 months until GeM 2.0 is delivered to the government.
In May, Infibeam disclosed that it received an email from GeM rejecting their bid due to an alleged non-fulfilment of pre-qualification criteria. It further said, “The current GeM engagement is for a period of 5 years from the date of its go live, which tentatively ends around December 2023. The current engagement can further be extended for 2 more years with similar terms and conditions on completion of the initial tenure/current engagement. If an extension is awarded, the current engagement shall continue up to December 2025.”
Meanwhile, TCS in a filing said, “This e-marketplace currently handles a GMV of over Rs 2 trillion purchased by over 70,000 buyer organisations from over 6.5 million sellers and service providers, including over 800,000 medium and small enterprises. The current platform, while successful, has architectural challenges in scaling up and in meeting the evolving needs of buyers and sellers.”
TCS currently gets about 4.9% of its revenue from India. The latest deal from the government comes close on the heels of another deal that a TCS-led consortium won from BSNL in May this year. The consortium received an advance purchase order valued over Rs 15,000 crore from BSNL for the deployment of 4G network across India.