GeM to be integrated with central public procurement portal by Sept: Talleen Kumar

The Government e-Marketplace office is working on a series of steps, including integrating the GeM platform with the central public procurement portal (CPPP), to further improve buying and selling process for ministries, departments and other agencies, an official said on Thursday.

GeM Chief Executive Officer Talleen Kumar said they are working to add over 100 new features in the existing portal to make it more dynamic, smart and transparent.

"These new features will be part of the new GeM 4.0. The work will be implemented by September 2020," he told reporters here.

He said that under the process, a unified procurement system will consolidate the entire government procurement into a single platform leading to economies of scale, better price discovery and sharing of best practices.

"Integration will be done with major platforms like CPPP," he said adding that it will lead to greater participation of railways and defence ministries on the GeM platform.

The other features include timely payments to sellers, demand aggregation, allowing buyers to place a single order for quantities to be delivered over a period with a defined schedule, advanced search engine, crowd sourcing of sellers, use of blockchain technology for bulk procurement of pharma, improving catalogue by adding parameters and price variance on the platform, and introduction of seller rating.

"Besides, we will be adding features like incident management policy overhaul, buyer-seller collaboration, and dedicated corners for public sector units and large buyers," Kumar said.

He also said buyer and sellers would be incentivised on portal in the form of non-monetary credits by completing key tasks like timely payments, and catalogue correction.

The commerce ministry launched Government e-Marketplace (GeM), an online platform for public procurement, in August 2016 with the objective of creating an open and transparent procurement platform for the government, which runs in several lakh crore.

Currently, government departments, ministries, public sector units, state governments, and Central Armed Police Forces are allowed to carry out transactions through this portal.

According to GeM, 3,42,455 sellers and service providers have registered with the portal so far to sell 20,91,674 products and 23,058 services.

The government has made it mandatory for all the departments and ministries to source goods and services from its e-marketplace.

The portal provides a wide range of products from office stationery to vehicles. Automobiles, computers and office furniture are currently the top product categories.

Services, including transportation, logistics, waste management, web casting and analytical, are listed on the portal.

Public procurement worth Rs 23,000 crore has taken place through GeM during the April 2019-March 4, 2020 period. In 2018-19, it was Rs 17,000 crore.

So far, Kumar said that 4,397 start-ups, 10,000 women sellers, 3,972 SC/ST entrepreneurs and 76,276 micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) have registered with the platform.