The Union Cabinet under the visionary leadership of the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has approved the registration of cooperative societies as ‘Buyers’ on Government e-Marketplace (GeM) platform. This will enable the cooperative societies to access more than 45 Lakh vendors on a single platform and to follow a transparent, economic and efficient procurement system.
Under the leadership of Union Minister of Cooperation Shri Amit Shah, Ministry of Cooperation is encouraging Multi State Cooperative Societies and Cooperative Societies registered under State Cooperative Acts to join the GeM platform for the benefit of their members and hopes that more and more cooperatives Societies will get benefit of this by joining GeM platform.
At present, there are about 8.54 lakh cooperatives in India with about 29 crore membership. They have been performing a wide range of activities for the production of goods and services. These cooperatives make huge purchases of goods and services from the open market to support their operations. There was a felt need to provide a platform to them to avail competitive prices through a transparent and efficient process resulting in benefit to the members of the cooperative societies.
Government e-Marketplace (GeM) has been set up as a National Procurement Portal to provide an end-to-end online market place for Central and State Government Ministries/ Departments, and PSUs etc. for procurement of common-use goods and services in a transparent and efficient manner. The Gross Merchandise Value of procurement using GeM was more than Rs.1 lakh crore in the FY 2021-22. There are around 54 lakh products listed across 9,702 product categories and 279 service categories. There was an estimated savings of around Rs.10,000 crores in the FY 2021-22.