Public procurement of goods and services: The Ministry of Defence has emerged out to be one of the top buyers on the government’s public procurement portal Government eMarketplace (GeM) till July in the current financial year, the portal said on X (formerly Twitter). As of July 31, the ministry had procured goods and services worth Rs 13,776 crore from the platform.
“Ministry of Defence leads the way as one of the top procurers on GeM! As of 31st July’23, MoD has defended its procurement leadership and made total purchases worth ₹13,776 Crore on GeM. @DefenceMinIndia continues to shine at the top on the GeM portal.”
The defence ministry was the top buyer of MSME goods via GeM in FY23 which nearly doubled its online procurement from the previous fiscal, according to the data shared by GeM. The ministry had made purchases worth Rs 28,732.9 crore in FY23, up by 90.4 per cent from Rs 15,090.8 crore worth of goods and services bought in FY22.
To promote the indigenisation of production in the defence sectors, and to support the Make in India initiative, more than 30,000 defence items by defence public sector units (DPSUs) and services on the Srijan portal have been offered to the industry including MSMEs, as told by the Minister of State for Defence Ajay Bhatt during the monsoon session of Lok Sabha in July, 2023.
In order to encourage the participation of MSMEs and startups in the development of defence technology, the government offers schemes such as Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX), Technology Development Fund (TDF), and Make Procedure under Defence Acquisition Procedure (DAP) 2020.
According to the statistics available on the platform, GeM has crossed the Rs 1.18 lakh order value in the current financial year while the volume of orders for the current financial year has crossed 21 lakhs. The platform has listed more than 2.60 lakh primary and secondary buyers, with 11,894 product categories and 308 service categories listed on the platform.