The procurement of goods and services from the Government e Marketplace (GeM) portal has crossed the Rs 2-trillion mark in 2022-2023, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal said on Saturday.
“I am confident that GeM will grow faster, the future is very bright. I would like to appeal to more and more vendors to join GeM so that they too get a chance to participate in the government procurement process,” the minister said at an event in Mumbai.
Goyal further said that after cooperatives in the country start procuring on the GeM platform, it would get a huge boost.
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According to an official statement, business worth about Rs 400 crore was done in 2017 on GeM, and in the second year, it did a business of about Rs 5,800 crore.
“The business through GeM has grown from around Rs 35,000 crore two years ago and tripled last year to Rs 1.06 trillion,” Goyal said.
Since its launch, GeM has surpassed Rs 3.9 trillion worth of gross merchandise value (GMV). “Based on various studies, the minimum savings on the platform are about 10%, which translates into savings of Rs 40,000 crore worth of public money,” according to the statement.
At present, GeM is catering to the procurement needs of over 67,000 government buyer organisations, it stated.
The portal features over 11,700 product categories with more than 3.2 million listed products as well as over 280 service categories with more than 280,000 service offerings
GeM, an online platform for public procurement, was launched on August 9, 2016, by the commerce ministry with the aim to create an inclusive, efficient and transparent platform for buyers and sellers to carry out procurement activities in a fair and competitive manner.
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The platform enables multiple procurement modes — direct purchase, L1 procurement (lowest bidder), bidding, reverse auction, and bid followed by reverse auction).
Through GeM, contactless, paperless and cashless transactions are carried out, where authentication of users is done through API integration with respective domain databases — Aadhaar, PAN, Startup, GSTN, MCA21, etc.