Government e-Marketplace upgrading its portal to make it future-ready: CEO

NEW DELHI: Public procurement platform GeM is upgrading its portal to handle higher data load and roll out a future-ready platform this year, its CEO Mihir Kumar said.

With the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) platform completing nine years, GeM is replatforming itself which will be a "data lake" for frictionless buyer-seller interface, Kumar told PTI.

"We are discussing how we can bring about ease of selling and buying on the GeM portal. How we can scale it up so that we can take data load of 5 times or 10 times of the present volume. We will be rolling out a future-ready platform in the current year," Kumar said.

The government e-Market (GeM) portal was launched on August 9, 2016, for online purchases of goods and services by all the central government ministries and departments. Since its launch, over Rs 17.33 lakh crore worth of government procurement has happened through it.

So far in the current fiscal, more than Rs 4 lakh crore goods and services were procured from GeM, with over 50 lakh buying and selling orders by various ministries and departments.

In the last fiscal, 72 lakh orders valued at Rs 5.43 lakh crore were placed on the portal.

GeM has over 1.5 lakh government buyers and over 62 lakh sellers and service providers offering a wide range of products and services.

Currently, government departments, ministries, public sector units, state governments, and central armed police forces are allowed to carry out transactions through this portal.

The portal provides a wide range of products from office stationery to vehicles. Automobiles, computers and office furniture are some of the major product categories.

Services, including transportation, hiring of helicopter services, logistics, waste management and webcasting, are listed on the portal.