India – which spends an estimated 20% of GDP on public procurement – has been struggling with the challenges of decentralized procurement of mostly IT, Networking & hardware for quite a long time.
While purchases in small quantities lose the benefits of economies of scale, they are also vulnerable to malpractices because it is very difficult to monitor thousands of small transactions. Small suppliers, too, find it difficult to reach buyers in other parts of the country without layers of intermediaries, pushing up their costs.
To deal with this challenge and based on the recommendations of two high-level committees, the Government of India set-up the Government e-Marketplace (Gem) in 2016. To provide policy support, a new enabling rule was introduced in 2017 through the government’s General Financial Rules (GFR), signaling its willingness to bring reform in this area.
Since then, this Business to Government (B2G) platform, has eliminated multiple levels of manual, sequential verification and decision-making, leading to dramatic reductions in lead-time in government procurement. For suppliers, too, this has opened attractive new options by eliminating intermediaries and guaranteeing the prompt release of payment.
Government e-Marketplace (GeM), has introduced a rating system for its buyers and sellers. The move is expected to turn transactions more efficient and healthier as government agencies have never been rated based on their treatment towards their suppliers before. On the other hand, a high rating would mean better business prospects for most private suppliers.
Supplier/vendor on GeM such as Radiant Info Solutions is enjoying the newly introduced rating system as it screens out those from the list who earlier enter in bidding just to distort the genuine supplier bid on a tender.
Maintaining a good repo as a genuine supplier of IT & Networking product to Government, Radiant Info Solutions is already matured in this system by collaborated with many government bodies for there IT requirement and maintained a trust level in the ecosystem of GeM.