GeM: Order volume crosses 1-crore mark; around 50% processed last year

Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Public procurement portal Government eMarketplace (GeM) has hit another milestone of 1 crore total orders processed so far, around a month after its seller base crossed the 40-lakh count. The number of orders almost doubled from 55.74 lakh orders processed as of January 2021, indicating four-and-a-half years the portal took to achieve that mark while the remaining orders came in following around 16 months only. GeM had also achieved Rs 1 lakh crore in order value in the financial year 2021-22.  

Launched in August 2016, the portal had processed 1,00,54,211 orders worth Rs 2.44 lakh crore from 60,074 government buyers including public sector units and government departments, data from the portal showed. Currently, there are nearly 43 lakh sellers. The growth was largely witnessed post Covid as the government urged central and state buyers for digital procurement of goods including Covid essentials such as PPE kits and masks from MSME sellers.

However, not all 43 lakh sellers may have contributed to the 1 crore-order mark. A number of them are inactive sellers and hence, GeM is looking to delist them, GeM’s Chief Executive Officer Prashant Kumar Singh had told Financial Express Online in an interaction in March this year. “GeM is integrated with the Udyam registration portal, hence a lot of sellers were directly registered on our portal because of their Udyam registration. Also, there might be other sellers who perhaps are not interested in selling on GeM,” Singh had said. 

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Not just seller base, the product category count is also being trimmed. From around 16,000 categories last year, the number was narrowed to 10,143 in March this year and currently it is reduced to 9,702. “We have removed around 6,000 categories three months back that had problems such as sellers were not onboarded properly or there were negligible sellers or products were not in demand in those categories,” Singh had added.