Goyal for making GeM portal more simple to attract MSME players

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal has directed officials handling public procurement portal GeM to make it more simple, less time consuming and attractive to attract vendors, especially from the MSME sector.

The minister's directive came during a meeting Thursday to review and formulate an action plan for Government e Marketplace (GeM) to achieve a target for Rs 1 lakh crore gross merchandise volume on the portal this fiscal.

The portal comes under the administrative control of the commerce ministry.

The ministry in a statement said that possibilities may be explored for incentivising ministries and states who procure more products and services from GeM.

He also directed the officers to maximize the use of GeM to ensure transparency and saving in procurements.

Quoting the minister, the statement said, "the procedure for using the GeM platform has to be made more simple, less time consuming and attractive so that more and more vendors, especially from the MSME sector, come on board".

Ease of getting registered on the GeM platform has to be ensured so that public sector banks, PSUs, ministries and departments of states and local bodies at the district level are able to procure from the platform easily and smoothly, he added.

The meeting also discussed ways of bringing in external technical experts for specialized products required by railways, oil companies, and health sector so that more categories are created in GeM in shortest time and complaints about substandard material are completely eliminated.

"Greater transparency and quality of products must be ensured on the platform in order to get railways, defence, telecom and PSUs like oil, power, heavy industry to place orders worth more than Rs 1 lakh crore through the GeM," Goyal said.

The ministry launched the GeM on August 9, 2016 with an objective of creating an open and transparent procurement platform for government departments, ministries and agencies.

As of now, over ten lakh goods and over 13,000 services are registered on the platform.