Team Blitz India
NEW DELHI: Public procurement forms an important part of Government activity. GeM is an effort from the Centre to transform the way procurement of goods and services is done by various ministries and departments, PSUs, and other autonomous bodies.
It is a platform enabling procurement of goods and services with a paperless, cashless, and system-driven e-market place.
GeM owes its genesis to the recommendations of two Groups of Secretaries made to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January 2016. They recommended setting up of a dedicated e-market for different goods and services procured or sold by Government and PSUs. It was also an exercise in the reform of the DGS&D.
Subsequently, in his Budget speech for 2016-17, the then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced setting up of a technology-driven platform to facilitate procurement of goods and services by various ministries and agencies of the Government.
The order placement and payment processing are almost without any human interface. Being an open platform, GeM offers no entry barriers to bonafide suppliers who wish to do business with the Government.
The platform offers efficiency since direct purchase on GeM can be done in a matter of minutes. The entire process is online, end-to-end integrated, and with online tools for assessing price reasonability.
More than 7,400 products are at present available on GeM POC portal. During bidding or reverse auction there is thus competition, fair play, speed and efficiency. The rates can also be confirmed through online comparison with market price on leading e-commerce portals.
