The Tata Consultancy Service (TCS) has been selected by the Centre or the government as their strategic partner to transform the Government e-marketplace (GeM).Â
The platform is under the ownership of GeM SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle), which is a Government owned NPO, (non profit company/organisation), undet Ministry of Commerce and Industries. Â
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What does Government e-Marketplace mean?
The Government e-marketplace or the GeM is an end to end platform of goods and services, operating online for central bodies and state government bodies, including the Public Sector Undertakings.
This concept was launched on August 9, 2016. It was the initiative undertaken by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
The objective behind establishment of such concept was providing an open and transparent procurement online platform particularly for the government buyers.
It is a contactless and cashless transaction place, which, in 2016 replaced the Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals (DGS&D).Â
GeM Partnership with TCS
The announcement was made on 8 August, 2024, Tuesday, confirming the TCS as the strategic partner of GeM, responsible to transform the e-marketplace and bringing in more transparency and efficiency into the process.
The CEO of TCS, P K Singh, mentioned that on partnering with TCS, GeM will be visioned to provide more ease and transparency to execute business actions.Â
He further added, that the government is seeking TCS’s expertise of managing missions of programmes.
The business head, Public Services at TCS, Tej Paul Bhatla, stated from the software company’s perspective, displaying pride to be added in the list of contributions to the Digital India. Â
Tata Consultsncy Services (TCS)
This becomes the second government project of to be handled by TCS, after agreeing with BSNL contract earlier this year.Â
Comparatively to the other IT companies, TCS has managed to build an impressive record of handling and executing government projects. Some of the TCS’s executed past government projects include, Indian Railways IRCTC site, and India Post’s Digital project as well as providing services for pension administrations, health insurances and financial inclusions. Besides these, the contract of Passport Seva programme with TCS was renewed last year, in agreement to the deal worth Rs 8000 crore.
This project will be taken into responsibility by the TCS’s Public Services India business unit, which builds technology led innovative solutions, for the central and state government. Therefore, the company will look into coming up with new innovative solutions simultaneously looking into current platform. Â
Aims of the TCS into this project
TCS currently handles the GeM’s Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), of nearly Rs 2 trillion, which facilitates transactions between 70,000 buyer organisations and over 6.5 million sellers and service providers. These overall consist of 80,000 MSMEs (middle and small enterprises).
Eventhough, the Government e-marketplace has been a successful initiative, some architectural challenges had to be faced. Henceforth, the Tata Consultance Services aim to resolve the concerned difficulties and meet the requirement ends of both buyers and sellers.
Under the hands os TCS, the new GeM will be witnessing e-commerce and e-platform principles, featuring multi tenant and multi lingual, open source and open API based architecture.
The company services targets to make the platform scalable and design to accommodate six-fold growth in the Gross Merchandise Value within a period of next 6 years, in accordance to the statements made by the TCS.
