The Cabinet on Wednesday decided to widen the mandate of the government e-marketplace (GeM) by allowing it to register cooperatives, including the private ones, as buyers on its platform.
The move will help over 854,000 registered cooperatives and their 270 million members, as they would get to purchase products from the GeM portal at competitive rates while ensuring greater transparency in their procurement system.
Currently, the portal is primarily meant for purchases of goods and services by ministries/departments of the Central government, state governments and various firms and entities run by them. As per extant guidelines, private-sector buyers are not allowed to purchase, although sellers can be from both the segments – private and government.
The GeM portal was launched in August 2016, as the Centre wanted to improve transparency in official procurement, apart from providing a new-age platform for this purpose. Sellers range from small businesses to large companies.
The list of cooperatives to be onboarded by the GeM – for both the pilot project and subsequent scale-up – will be decided by the ministry of cooperation in consultation with the GeM special purpose vehicle.
GeM will offer a dedicated onboarding process for cooperatives, technical infrastructure to support additional users on existing portals and other assistance to them. The ministry of cooperation will issue advisories to encourage cooperative societies to make use of the GeM platform for the procurement of goods and services.
At the same time, to protect the sellers’ interests and ensure timely payments, the modalities of payment systems will be decided by GeM in consultation with the cooperation ministry. The overall pace and mechanism of roll-out would be decided by the ministry.
A spurt in purchases by various ministries and departments drove up the procurement of goods and services through the GeM portal to a record `1 trillion in FY22, reflecting its growing acceptability as an online marketplace. Before the latest feat, procurement through the portal had breached the `1 trillion mark in as many as four-and-a-half years.
