New Delhi, Jan 13 (KNN) Online procurement of goods on Government e-Marketplace (GeM) by defence services and organisations under the Ministry of Defence grew 72 per cent by the end of December FY21 from around the year-ago period, said a senior official.

Defence Secretary Ajay Kumar took to the microblogging site twitter on New Year's day and said, “Defence Services & organizations are adopting Government e-Marketplace in their procurements rapidly. 72 per cent growth in 2020-21 over 2019-20.”

From goods procured worth Rs 1,406 crore as of November 30, 2019, the order value grew to Rs 2,425 crore, as per data shared by Kumar. The overall procurement by defence organisations and departments for FY20 stood at Rs 2,810 crore.

Notably, the Commerce Ministry in its Year End review had said that the total transaction value on GeM has crossed Rs 74,552 crore as on December 30th, 2020.

''There are 17.6 lakh listed products, 9 lakh sellers and service providers and 11,543 product categories on GeM promoting transparent public procurement while giving a fair opportunity and level playing field to vendors,'' the Ministry added.

The Modi government had launched the GeM portal back on August 9, 2016, in order to bring more speed and transparency to the government buying process for small businesses to leverage. Goyal also shared the number of start-ups registered on the GeM portal that grew 70 per cent from 4,297 as of November 1, 2019, to 7,315 as of November 1, 2020.

“GeM was started with an objective to transform the legacy procurement system in the country. A rapid growth in Average Order Value per day in the current FY 2020-21 is showing the higher acceptability of the platform for procurement purposes,” GeM had tweeted.

According to data shared by the portal, the marketplace was able to add 40,212 new sellers on an average per month and 486 new product categories per month in 2020. It also added over 1 lakh sellers in November itself, registered under Udham Aadhaar under the Ministry of MSME.

In November this year, the Union Minister of Commerce and Industry (C&I) Piyush Goyal had said that the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) was playing a crucial role in Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) growth.

The minister took to the micro-blogging site twitter and said,'' In line with PM Narendra Modi’s Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) is playing a crucial role in catalysing the growth of MSMEs, promoting women entrepreneurship, and enabling start-ups to reach out to government buyers.''