Government eMarket Place (GeM) is a national procurement portal dedicated to efficiency, transparency and speed in procurement. The portal has facilitated procurement of Rs. 2 lakh crore in a single financial year 2022-23.
The GeM portal has been able to change the old procurement process and add value along with efficiency to the process of public procurement. The benefits have been the following:
- The portal allows registration of new sellers without any human interface. The induced competition has allowed better price discovery and larger savings for the government. Saved money been spent in welfare programs without compromising on the fiscal health.
- The transparency in government procurements has made an opaque, time consuming, cumbersome procurement process into efficient, honest and accessible process.
- Payment to the vendor, which got delayed earlier, has become paperless and automated now. Hence, the vendor payments are timely, helping the vendors grow.
- 56% of the order value processed through the portal has been delivered through Micro, Small and Medium sized Enterprises (MSME). The portal has allowed MSME and small business access to the highly sought after government orders.
- The portal is a shining example of use of technology to ease governance. The portal uses technology and live tracking to book orders, deliver orders timely and release payments to the vendors.
- The participation of government agency is diversified, and Central/State governments, central/state PSUs have been procuring from GeM.
- The portal allows the online marketplace to aggregate demands from multiple entities for similar products, and build in the preference provided by State Governments to small enterprises. This allows discovery, variety and neutrality in placing orders for government procurement.
However, there has been certain drawbacks in the implementation of GeM:
- Only 10% of the government procurement value (about Rs. 20 Lakh Crore) is processed by GeM portal. A lot of progress is remaining.
- States from south have not participated well, since they have their own portal and these states (Tamil Nadu and Karnataka) feel that opening door to GeM would be detrimental to the sellers in the state.
- Language has been a big barrier in inter-state trade and large distance procurement.
More than 2.36 crore flags worth over Rs 60 Crore was procured by different government departments on GeM portal from over 4100 sellers in Har Ghar Tiranga campaign. Within a short span of time, GeM has reached fourth rank globally in terms of value of transaction. Many other milestones are yet to come in the future.
