Who’s selling on GeM portal? These sellers have lion’s share in government e-procurement

GeM is currently undertaking GeM Samvaad initiative to reach out to more MSE sellers.

Trade, Imports, Exports for MSMEs: Despite having only nearly 22 per cent share in the total count of 3.29 lakh sellers on the business-to-government online marketplace Government e-Marketplace (GeM), micro and small sellers (71,941) have a majority share in the total order value of the goods sold. Out of Rs 46,203 crore of goods sold by sellers on GeM to government organisations, departments, ministries, 52.65 per cent of the value of orders has come from MSE sellers, as per the data sourced from the GeM portal. The total number of orders placed so far on the portal is over 33.71 lakh.

The marketplace was launched by the Commerce Ministry in August 2016 to increase transparency and efficiency in the public procurement process. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her budget speech this month had proposed to increase the turnover of GeM to Rs 3 lakh crore. Currently, GeM hosts 43,005 government buyers and has over 19 lakh products listed across 5,274 categories. Apart from this, there are 21,317 services listed across 116 service categories.

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Similar to Commerce Ministry’s GeM, MSME Ministry is also planning a dedicated e-commerce platform on the lines of Alibaba and Amazon called Bharat Craft to help MSMEs scale and export products. MSME Minister had, however, last year said that this will be integrated with the GeM to leverage synergies between the two. This is likely to help curb duplication of goods and cut the cost of doing business.

GeM is currently undertaking GeM Samvaad initiative to reach out to more MSE sellers and get them on-board the marketplace to sell across India. The marketplace has organised these programmes in multiple states including Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Kerala, Odisha, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and more. The government reportedly has plans to give access to private businesses to the GeM portal which will then compete with the likes of IndiaMART, Moglix, IndustryBuying etc.