Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Launched in August 2016, the public procurement marketplace for public sector enterprises across various departments and ministries to purchase goods and services directly from micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the country currently has nearly 39 lakh sellers.
Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: The business-to-government (B2G) portal Government eMarketplace (GeM), under Ministry of Commerce and Industry, is planning to delist sellers that are not active on the platform, GeM’s Chief Executive Officer Prashant Kumar Singh told TheSpuzz Online. Launched in August 2016, the public procurement marketplace for public sector enterprises across various departments and ministries to purchase goods and services directly from micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the country currently has nearly 39 lakh sellers.
“GeM is integrated with 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. We will be beginning to send mailers to such sellers that in case they are not keen to sell on GeM, we would remove them. This would clear the clutter and make active sellers more visible on the platform with more opportunities to sell to the government,” said Singh. The current count of active seller base wasn’t disclosed.
GeM would begin engagement with such sellers from April onwards at the state level and at the same time attract businesses who are willing to work with the government.
“There could be sellers on GeM selling products that government doesn’t need. So we would filter out such sellers. We will carry out a proper campaign also to understand the challenges they might be facing before delisting them and would be happy to get them back on the portal if they are interested ahead,” Singh added. He noted that the exercise will help GeM restructure its efforts toward handholding genuine sellers on the platform.
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GeM had crossed the 10-lakh-seller mark in January last year — within four-and-a-half years of its launch. The other nearly 30 lakh sellers were added to the platform in the following 14 months. On the other hand, the Udyam portal was launched in July 2020 to enable paperless and free-of-cost MSME registration for businesses following the reclassification of the MSME sector in June 2020.
Singh said the total number of product and service categories are also being revisited to remove those that have products with poor demand. From around 16,000 categories, the number has been reduced to 10,143 categories. “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,” said Singh.
So far, 93 lakh orders have been processed via GeM with a transaction value of Rs 2 lakh crore. While it took four-and-a-half years (August 2016 – February 2021) for the marketplace to hit the Rs 1-lakh-crore mark in transaction value, the second Rs 1-lakh-crore mark was achieved in the following 12 months. Singh said GeM would close the current financial year with an overall transaction value of around Rs 2.1 lakh crore.