Govt e-marketplace may clock Rs 50,000 Cr per year, surpass Flipkart, Amazon

Transactions on the Government e-marketplace (GeM) will soon surpass the yearly combined transactions on e-commerce behemoths Flipkart and Amazon in India.

GeM is an end-to-end procurement system developed by the Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals (DGS&D) for the purchase of goods and services of common use by government buyers.

The portal is expected to clock transactions of Rs 50,000 crore per year and touch the figure of Rs 2 lakh crore in the next few years, GeM’s additional CEO HR Sharma told Economic Times.

In the past ten months, transactions on the platform have surged. Since April last year, the platform did total transactions of Rs 4,080 crore. In January this year, total transactions surpassed Rs 1,000 crore.

The GeM was launched as a pilot in August 2016 as the government’s National Procurement Portal of India.

According to estimates, the government procures products worth around Rs 5-7 lakh crore a year for states and the central government put together. The finance ministry had amended the General Financial Rules to make it compulsory for all government departments to procure items and services from this portal.

Last week, the Ministry of Commerce & Industry announced a transformation programme - GeM 3.0, which would offer standardised and enriched catalogue management, real time price comparison, template-based bid and RA creation, demand aggregation, user rating, analytics and other services.

Besides, in an effort to make a smooth transition from GeM 2.0 to GeM 3.0, the government has launched ‘National Sellers On-boarding Campaign’ to train sellers and service providers.

In July last year, Intellect and Infibeam won the bid to run the government e-marketplace.

Infibeam had to provide its expertise in e-commerce services while Intellect was to manage the operations. Besides, another company Tata Communications offered cloud services.