The e-procurement market place for the Andhra Pradesh government was launched here today.
The marketplace has been built with the help of Commerce One India Limited and provides services for electronic tendering, forward and reverse auctions, rate contracts and catalogue based purchases.
Initially, e-procurement services will be available for four government departments-- irrigation, roads & buildings, medical and health and Andhra Pradesh Technology Services Limited and the Andhra Pradesh Road Transport Corporation.
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Based on the experience gained, a joint venture between the state government and CommerceOne will be formed and the entire procurement work of the government, estimated at around Rs 8,000 crore per year, will be entrusted to it.
Commerce One has invested around Rs 6 crore on the hardware and development of the necessary software for the portal.
The government departments will pay the company Rs 4,500 per tender document notified and where a tender is finalised through the portal, an additional 0.24 percent of the cost of work as commission.
According to the IT secretary Ajay Sawhney, the savings to the government as a result of e-procurement will be considerable.
Apart from savings towards newspaper advertisements which run into several lakhs every month, there will be a saving of five to 10 percent in the financial value and over 70 per cent saving in time since several manual procedures would be done away with. All this without the government spending any money on the system.
The minister for roads and buildings, T Nageshwer Rao, who formally launched the marketplace, said much of the current