Amid Covid, Modi govt’s e-purchases from MSMEs swelled nearly 300%; bought for this much amount daily

Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: The public procurement by ministries, government organisations, and departments from MSMEs has shot up via online channel amid the Covid pandemic. The e-commerce marketplace for government procurement Government eMarketplace (GeM) witnessed the average daily order value increasing 282 per cent from Rs 34.12 crore in April 2020 to Rs 130.53 crore in October 2020, as per the GeM data. The marketplace was launched on August 9, 2016, by the Modi government to ensure efficiency and transparency in the government buying process and enable small businesses and other sellers to reach out to more customers digitally.

“GeM was started with an objective to transform the legacy procurement system in the country. A rapid growth in Avg Order Value per day in the current FY 2020-21 is showing the higher acceptability of the platform for procurement purpose,” GeM said tweeting the information recently. The portal currently has over 8.6 lakh sellers including 3.48 lakh micro and small sellers with an order value share of 57.7 per cent out of the total transaction value of Rs 73,908 crore as of December 8, 2020. Currently, 48,456 buyers are registered with the GeM portal that has processed 51.73 lakh orders to date.

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In the current year, the marketplace was able to add an average 40,212 new sellers per month and 486 new product categories per month. The portal also boasts of over 20,000 artisans and 1.2 lakh weavers registered on GeM. Amid growth in the number of sellers and order base, the government had recently taken note of the possibilities of fake or inferior quality goods being sold online. The Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal in August had cautioned sellers against selling such goods or charging high prices. Goyal “cautioned the unscrupulous sellers from pushing the poor quality goods or charging exorbitant prices,” the ministry had said in a statement. The minister had added that such sellers will be blacklisted not only from the GeM portal but from the “entire government ecosystem.”