GeM, MyGov platforms should provide opportunity for start-ups: IT secy

Electronics and IT secretary Ajay Prakash Sawhney Monday said the government's MyGov and e-commerce platform GeM should provide an opportunity to start-ups so that country is able to develop homegrown solutions.

"The combination of what MyGov and GeM (Government e-Marketplace) together can do is something extraordinary. Innovation is far more difficult than simply consuming ready-made products. Let's create an opportunity for start-ups, to showcase their products, actually use their products on GEM and then GEM itself becomes an extraordinary opening market for start-ups," Sawhney said.

He was speaking at an interactive session on 'Language Localisation & CRM Services on GeM', organised by FICCI and GeM.

He said that GeM opens a window of sellers to reach out to government departments which will be big support for start-ups and gradually India will be able to develop home-grown solutions.

Sawhney said that language localisation was the key to capitalise on the opportunities in open and transparent public procurement services of the GeM for vendors and buyers.

"Although there are many challenges which include speech recognition in various languages, translating speech to text and text to speech, optical and handwriting recognition. But all efforts are being made to ensure that a Malayalam and Bangla speaking vendor or buyer is able to have a dialogue in real time. There are silos that exist in the market which we can address," Sawhney said.

Radha Chauhan, CEO, GeM said that GeM was designed to make public procurement processes of the government transparent and it was imperative to have language localisation to make 'Digital India' a transformative movement.

On Customer relationship management (CRM), Chauhan said that GeM was equipped to handle calls in 10 Indian languages which are transactional and the challenge to be overcome now is to create solutions in various languages for processing of services like public procurement bidding.