Indian govt chooses TCS to enhance and transform GeM; check details here

The Government of India has chosen to partner with the IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for the enhancement of Government e-Marketplace (GeM), as per the company’s press release on Tuesday.

The government is aiming to transform the current online marketplace into a state-of-the-art public procurement platform with enhanced efficiency, transparency and inclusivity. GeM is an end-to-end marketplace for the central government, state governments and public sector undertakings (PSUs). The entities use it to procure common use goods and services in a transparent and efficient manner.

Currently, the marketplace handles a Gross Merchandising Value (GMV) of Rs 2 lakh crore, with over 70,000 buyer organisations and 65 lakh goods and service providers, which include over 8 lakh medium and small enterprises. Though the current platform is working successfully, it still lacks to fulfil the evolving needs of its users while also facing difficulties to scale-up.

As per the company's statement, under its partnership with the government, TCS will equip the current platform with new technologies to provide modern solutions. The new platform will be a mixture of e-commerce and e-marketplace principles with multi-rule, multi-tenancy and multilingual support. It will be based have an open-source and open-API architecture making it capable of handling the predicted six-fold increase in GMV in the coming years.

The new platform will be designed for interoperability and cloud neutrality, making it technology agnostic and vendor-independent. Its deep configurability will ease the onboarding of diverse buyer organizations having local rules, thus allowing them to transact on the national platform while maintaining their local flavour.

The company will also focus on enhancing the user experience for all stakeholders. GeM will get a new adaptable design to ease the onboarding of new sellers, driving greater participation from a more diverse vendor base, especially SMEs /MSMEs, resulting in greater inclusivity and a more democratized access to the public sector market. The new platform will use data analytics to forecast projections and improve supply chain management, and advanced AI/ML technologies to help identify potential fraud, enabling more transparent operations.

“In its next avatar, GeM is envisioned to be an all-inclusive platform for government procurement, offering improved ease of doing business and transparency,” said P K Singh, CEO of GeM.

“With TCS as our SI partner, we are assured of architecting the new GeM with unmatched experience, rigor, and passion to develop a world class solution with resilient design, enriched user experience and innovative services. We also look forward to TCS’ expertise of managing mission mode programs. We have a strong aspiration to scale up GeM to transcend geographies," he added.

“We are proud to partner with the Government of India for the GeM platform’s digital transformation, adding to our long list of contributions to Digital India. Our extensive experience in delivering large-scale transformation projects, technology expertise, deep domain knowledge in public services, and world-class delivery governance will help GeM achieve its vision for the next decade," TCS’ Business Head of Public Services, Tej Paul Bhatla said.

“The new GeM platform will transform public procurement with enhanced user experience, improved transparency, and greater inclusivity,” Bhatla added.