Piyush Goyal: GeM portal to be simplified to attract more MSMEs
According to the minister, ease of getting registered on the GeM platform has to be ensured so that public sector banks, PSUs, ministries, departments of states, and local bodies at the district level are able to procure from the platform.
Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal has directed officials handling public procurement portal Government e-Marketplace (GeM) to make it more simple, less time-consuming, and attractive for vendors, especially from the MSME sector.
The minister's directive came during a meeting on Thursday to review and formulate an action plan for GeM to achieve a target of Rs 1 lakh crore gross merchandise volume (GMV) on the portal this fiscal year.
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.
Goyal also directed the officers to maximise the use of GeM to ensure transparency and saving in procurements.
Ease of getting registered on the GeM platform has to be ensured so that public sector banks, PSUs, ministries, 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 specialised products required by the Railways, oil companies, and the health sector so that more categories are created in GeM in a short span of time and complaints about substandard material are reduced.
"Greater transparency and quality of products must be ensured on the platform in order to get the Railways, defence, telecom and PSUs like oil, power, and heavy industry to place orders worth more than Rs 1 lakh crore through the GeM," Goyal said.
The ministry launched 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 10 lakh goods and over 13,000 services are registered on the platform.
In April 2019, a government statement revealed that GeM grossed over Rs 23,000 crore worth of sales through 17 lakh transactions in 2018-19. Forty-two percent of these transactions, sorted by volume, were done with MSMEs registered on the platform.
(Edited by Dipti Nair)
