GeM Portal: How Modi’s Government Digitised Public Procurement

Government purchasing, everything from office supplies to major equipment contracts, has traditionally been a complex, often opaque process in India, with smaller businesses frequently finding it difficult to compete for contracts dominated by larger, better-connected suppliers. The Government e-Marketplace, launched in 2016, aimed to change this. This article explains how the platform works and what it has achieved.

What Problem GeM Was Designed to Solve

Before GeM’s launch, government procurement in India relied heavily on traditional tendering processes that, according to the Centre for Public Impact’s analysis of the platform, often involved considerable paperwork, limited price transparency, and structural barriers that made it difficult for smaller businesses, particularly those without existing government relationships, to compete effectively for public contracts, a pattern that tended to favour larger, more established suppliers with the resources to navigate the traditional tendering system.

How the Platform Works

GeM functions as an open, online marketplace where government departments and public sector organisations can purchase goods and services directly from registered sellers, with prices and product listings visible transparently to all registered government buyers, according to IMPRI’s explainer on the platform’s design, replacing the previous, more opaque tendering process with something closer to a transparent e-commerce marketplace specifically built for government procurement.

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The Scale Achieved

According to a Press Information Bureau release, GeM crossed an annual procurement volume of Rs 1 lakh crore within the 2021-22 financial year, a scale of transaction volume reflecting rapid adoption across government departments since the platform’s 2016 launch, with the platform’s own growth trajectory continuing to expand in subsequent years according to more recent coverage of the platform’s ongoing outreach and adoption efforts.

The MSME Access Benefit

One of the most consistently highlighted benefits of the platform has been its effect on expanding access for micro, small, and medium enterprises specifically. Invest India’s promotional materials, describing GeM as a “treasure trove” for small and medium enterprises specifically, and Bidz365’s analysis of how the platform “changed Indian procurement,” both point to GeM’s transparent, standardised listing process as having meaningfully lowered the practical barriers smaller businesses previously faced competing for government contracts against larger, more established suppliers under the older tendering system.

The Ongoing Outreach to Expand Participation

Government efforts to expand the platform’s reach have continued well beyond its initial launch, with News on Air’s coverage of a specific outreach event held in Ranchi, Jharkhand, aimed at boosting digital public procurement participation in that state, illustrating an ongoing, geographically targeted effort to expand both buyer and seller participation on the platform across India’s states rather than treating the platform’s initial rollout as a completed, finished initiative.

What Independent Assessment Suggests

Independent analysis of GeM’s actual impact on procurement costs, competition, and small-business participation has generally found positive directional evidence consistent with the platform’s stated goals, though, as with several other governance digitisation initiatives covered in this series, fully isolating GeM’s specific causal effect on procurement outcomes from other simultaneous economic and policy factors affecting government purchasing and small-business participation during this same period remains a genuinely complex analytical exercise rather than a simple, single-variable comparison.

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How This Fits the Broader Digital Governance Pattern

GeM represents a specific application of the same broader digital governance philosophy evident across UPI, DigiLocker, and the National Single Window System covered elsewhere in this series: replacing a previously fragmented, less transparent process with a centralised, transparent digital platform, a consistent design pattern across many of the Modi-era governance reforms covered throughout this category.

The Platform’s Current Scale

GeM’s growth since crossing the Rs 1 lakh crore annual mark in FY22 has continued at a considerable pace. According to Press Information Bureau figures current as of August 2026, the platform now connects nearly 25 lakh registered sellers and service providers with over 1.37 lakh government buyer organisations spanning central ministries, state governments, and public sector undertakings, while cumulative procurement value transacted through the platform since its 2016 launch has crossed Rs 20 lakh crore, a scale roughly 20 times larger than the single-year figure that made headlines back in 2022, reflecting both the platform’s expanding seller base and its increasingly central role in how government bodies across India now source goods and services.

This roughly twentyfold growth in cumulative transaction value since the FY22 milestone also reflects a broadening base of participating sellers, since the platform’s expanding MSME registration base described earlier has meant an increasing share of that procurement value flows to smaller businesses that would have struggled to access this scale of government contracting opportunity under the older, pre-2016 tendering system.

Bottom Line

The Government e-Marketplace has digitised public procurement at substantial scale since its 2016 launch, crossing Rs 1 lakh crore in annual procurement volume within its first several years, with particular benefits documented for smaller businesses that previously struggled to access government contracts under the older, more opaque tendering system, a genuine transparency and access improvement consistent with the broader digital governance pattern evident across this category’s other reforms.

FAQ

Abhyudaya Verma