The Union government has reworked the contract with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for transforming the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) as part of which a new revenue model will be put in place that would reduce the payout to the service provider, Commerce Ministry officials said on August 14.
In July, TCS was selected as a strategic partner by the government to transform the GeM into a state-of-the-art public procurement platform with enhanced transparency, efficiency, and inclusivity.
TCS won the contract on July 13 to maintain operations of the GeM portal. Thursday’s development comes as the contract with another service provider, Intellect, is set to expire in December 2023.
The officials told CNBC-TV18 that a much better UI/UX for GeM will ensure better numbers for the portal. The officials added that all gram panchayats will be on-boarded as buyers on GeM by October 2.
In a statement earlier this month, TCS noted that the GeM platform provides an end-to-end online marketplace for central and state government bodies, including public sector undertakings, for procurement of common use goods and services in a transparent and efficient manner.
This e-marketplace currently handles a Gross Merchandize Value (GMV) of over Rs 2 trillion purchased by over 70,000 buyer organizations from over 6.5 million sellers and service providers, including over 800,000 medium and small enterprises.
“The current platform, while successful, has architectural challenges in scaling up and in meeting the evolving needs of buyers and sellers," the tech giant had said in a filing.
TCS said its partnership with the government will see the firm design and build a new modern solution leveraging new technologies, while maintaining the current platform.
The new GeM platform will be based on e-commerce and e-marketplace principles with multi-tenancy, multi-rule, multilingual, open source, and open-API-based architecture. It will be highly scalable, designed to accommodate the anticipated six-fold growth in GMV over the next six years.
P K Singh, CEO, GeM, had then said, “In its next avatar, GeM is envisioned to be an all-inclusive platform for government procurement, offering improved ease of doing business and transparency."
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