Govt plans standard purchase procedure for social media services through GeM

The government is planning to develop a standard process for its various social media services like making short videos and posting messages on social networking sites.

It mulls to place uniform criteria and purchase procedures for handling these services through the national public procurement portal - Government e-Marketplace (GeM).

As per government official, GeM has been in talks with various govt departments and public sector units to host social media services and consulting services, which generally require continuous assessment.

The govt does not want these departments to go to third-party agencies for the services, quoted ET report an official close to the development as saying.

Almost three years ago, GeM portal was launched as a pilot of the government’s National Procurement Portal of India to create an open and transparent procurement platform for government departments.

At present, GeM claims to host over 8000 services led by vehicle hiring, cloud, catering, security manpower and human resource outsourcing.

Besides, on commerce side, GeM has recorded more than 725,000 transactions worth more than Rs 11,250 crore, as per last year figure.

According to the GeM portal, it has over 27,000 buyer organizations registered on the platform and about 1.5 lakh sellers and service providers offering more than 4 lakh products. GeM contributes to about 25 % average overall savings to the government.

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 year, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) 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.

The government had also launched the ‘National Sellers On-boarding Campaign’ to train sellers and service providers.

The government-owned portal is aiming to reach $25 billion GMV by 2021.