GeM 4.0: Amazon of govt buying allows buyers to schedule deliveries for upto 1 year with this feature

GeM has over 4.32 lakh sellers out of which more than 1.14 lakh are micro and small sellers with a majority share of 57.74 per cent in the total order value.

Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Ahead of its soon-to-be-launched advanced version touted as GeM 4.0, the government’s e-commerce marketplace portal has enabled ‘staggered delivery’ feature for buyers including government departments, organisations, PSUs, etc. Through the GeM portal, buyers will now be able to schedule the delivery of products for up to 1 year at the time of bid creation itself,” Department of Commerce tweeted on Tuesday. GeM currently has over 4.32 lakh sellers and service providers out of which more than 1.14 lakh are micro and small sellers with a majority share of 57.74 per cent in the total order value, as per data available on the GeM portal.

“Now sellers including MSEs will be able to take order in a single bid and deliver it in a year’s time as scheduled by the buyer. Let’s say if you don’t have the product currently to deliver, you can do that later as per the staggered order in order to meet the demands of the buyer. Small businesses in sectors like defense, where they don’t produce goods currently that Chinese companies do, will now have time to manufacture and deliver them after winning the bid. This will support the Vocal For Local campaign,” Sanjiv Layek, Executive Secretary, World Association For Small And Medium Enterprises (WASME) told Financial Express Online.

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The portal is likely to be revised with new features such as demand aggregation to collate multiple orders for the same product for various consignees across different organisations in the same Ministry in a single bid, according to GeM. The new portal will also have natural language processing-based search engine to show buyers the most relevant products based on their search, rating sellers and filtering products based on ratings, “ideation and collaboration platform” for vendors and buyers to interact with each other, onboarding MSMEs and self-help groups, etc. registered in Hunar Haat and Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India onto the portal and more.

Adding new features to the portal gain significance as public procurement from government organisations run into crores of rupees every year. From Rs 1.14 lakh crore of total procurement in FY18 including Rs 23,357 crore procurement from MSEs, the amount increased to over Rs 1.53 lakh crore in FY19 with MSEs’ share of Rs 40,377 crore. The procurement amount for FY20 stood at nearly Rs 1.24 lakh crore including close to Rs 38,000 crore worth procurement from MSEs. For FY21 so far, Rs 12,619 worth of goods and services have been procured by the government departments out of which MSEs’ share stood at Rs 4,147 crore. This has benefited 11,069 MSEs in the current financial year, according to the data published on public procurement monitoring portal MSME Sambandh.