As per GeM Chief Executive Officer Talleen Kumar, a unified procurement system will consolidate the entire government procurement into a single platform leading to economies of scale, better price discovery and sharing of best practices.
The plan is to add over 100 new features in the existing portal to make it more transparent as part of GeM 4.0.
“Integration will be done with major platforms like CPPP… The work will be implemented by September 2020,” he said adding that it will lead to greater participation of railways and defence ministries on the GeM platform.
The commerce and industry ministry launched GeM on August 9, 2016, in place of the Directorate General of Supplies and Disposal with the objective of creating an open and transparent procurement platform of commonly used goods and services for government departments, ministries and agencies. It aims to streamline procurement by the Central and state governments, which put together, is estimated at Rs 5-7 lakh crore each year.
On the other hand, CPPP is operational since 2012 and provides a single point access to all the tendering information on various procurements made across the country.
Actual purchase on GeM so far in 2019-20 is about Rs 23,000 crore.
