GeM To Witness Procurement Worth Rs 1 Lakh Crore in 2021-22: Talleen Kumar

Government procurement has witnessed a great amount of change in the last few years. Specially with the advent and emergence of GeM platform, things have moved in new directions. While getting a predictive insight, goods and services worth over Rs 1 lakh crore are expected to be procured from the public procurement portal GeM in 2021-22. This sharp growth is expected due to a sharp increase in buying activities by ministries like defence and PSUs, a senior official of Government e-Marketplace informed.

The Government e-Market (GeM) portal was launched in August 2016 for online purchases of goods and services by all the central government ministries and departments.

GeM CEO Talleen Kumar said that the order value in 2020-21 is projected at Rs 37,000 crore, up from Rs 22,896 crore last year. “With the onboarding of the Ministry of Railways getting completed by March 2021, GeM is headed towards an order value of more than Rs one lakh crore next fiscal, which will be a ‘3X’ increase over current levels,” Kumar mentioned in a conversation with PTI- India's leading newswire agency.

The PSU Factor

The public sector units (PSUs) procured goods and services worth over Rs 3,372 crore on GeM so far this year. Similarly the Ministry of Defence has bought goods and/or services worth over Rs 3,406 crore this year so far.

He said that onboarding railways involves the development of 42 railway-specific features and functionalities. Kumar also said that the GeM is steadily moving towards the vision of a Unified Procurement System with an aim to consolidate all government procurement onto a single, cohesive platform which can lead to economies of scale, more efficient price discovery, and sharing of best practices.

To promote the sale of Made in India goods, he said, GeM is capturing the ‘country of origin’ data for products already on the platform.

“GeM has also enabled a provision to indicate the percentage of local content in products on the platform. Hence, government buyers can now view and filter across goods for both their ‘country of origin’ as well as ‘percentage of local content,” he added.

Further, he added that the next version of the platform - GeM 5.0 - is stepping up the use of new technologies like AI (artificial intelligence) including machine learning and deep learning.