The Centre's procurement portal Government e-Marketplace (GeM) is expecting Rs 40,000 crore gross merchandise value (GMV) by the end of current fiscal, despite levying a transaction fee from sellers to recover costs, a top official said today.
In the last two years of operations of the GeM portal, the total cumulative procurement was worth Rs 11,000 crore. We are targeting Rs 40,000 crore worth of transaction on the marketplace by end of the current fiscal, GeM additional CEO AK Kamra said here.
GMV is the sale price charged to the customer multiplied by the number of items sold.
He said that since mid-July, GeM has started levying a transaction fee of 0.5 per cent from the sellers in order to recover its operational cost.
GeM was launched in August, 2016 to facilitate online procurement of common-use goods and services required by both central and state governments, organisations and public sector units.
Asked what led to a four-fold rise in procurement target, Kamra said there has been a steady rise in listed products and the number of buyers have increased significantly.
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He was in the city to participate at a seminar organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce.
Around 25 state governments have signed agreement with the national portal for procurement, including West Bengal.
Kamra said the portal has now 1,900 different product categories and four lakh products are available on the portal including IT equipment, requirements of para-military, defence and police modernisation, clothing and items for sports authorities.
Kamra said GeM is for manufacturers and direct buyers and have started the process to weed out the intermediaries.
As per the public procurement policy, 358 product categories have been reserved for small and medium enterprises he said, adding that more than 44 lakh units have been registered in the portal.
We are trying to bring all the product categories reserved for the MSEs in the portal. Some of them have already been included. We have requested the Ministry of MSMEs to provide specifications of the reserved product categories," he added.