NEW DELHI: Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday announced that
government’s e-Marketplace (GeM), the one-stop online marketplace for procurement of goods and services, will soon tie up with state governments for their local procurement and help them create a transparent, accountable and efficient public procurement system and expects an estimated transaction at Rs 10,000 crore a year.
Sitharaman said GeM will be offered to state government and that her ministry will actively work with various state governments to promote it. “We shall now be going forward to encourage states to have an MoU with the GeM so that their procurement can also go through the transparent process.”
The Minister also dismissed setting up of an independent enquiry on the allegation of Congress against GeM. “The charges are baseless, motivated and malafide, infact the government has made a saving of over Rs 100 crore in the total procurement of about Rs 450 crore that has taken place through GeM.”
The commerce ministry officials said vendors from small towns are getting an opportunity to do business with the government, in contrast to the erstwhile rate contract system where not more than 3500 suppliers were holding a monopoly to supply to the government at fixed rates.
Over 9,000 products from 250 categories including computers, stationery and several services are registered by different vendors on the portal.The Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals is working on increasing the number of services by including areas like cleaning, plumbing and digitisation of records.