Amit Shah e-launches onboarding of cooperatives on GeM portal

Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah e-launched the onboarding of cooperatives on the Government e-Marketplace (GeM portal) in New Delhi today. GeM has about 62,000 buyers from the government sector and about 49 lakh sellers registered on the portal. With about 8.5 lakh cooperatives added to this buyers list, the GeM portal will have an enormous size.  Besides, more than 10,000 products and more than 288 services have been registered. The portal has witnessed transactions worth Rs 2.78 lakh so far.   

Speaking on the occasion, Shah said that the cooperative sector had remained neglected after Independence, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi had accelerated its expansion with historic reforms and modernization. The Ministry of Cooperation has constantly been working on 25-30 initiatives parallelly for the past one year.

Shah said that the GeM portal would be very useful in bringing transparency to the cooperative sector. And it is only when there is transparency that the farmers and milk producers will trust the cooperatives and their members more. There may be some teething administrative troubles, but nobody should doubt the intention. Shah said that it was essential to bring transparency to elections, recruitment and procurement in the cooperative sector. He said that he was confident that in five years, GeM would serve as a successful model for the world when it came to transparency in public procurement.

The onboarding of cooperative societies/banks will be done in a phased manner. In the first phase, cooperative societies/banks with turnover/deposits of more than Rs 100 crore as per the latest audited financial statement and with A Grade auditing have been taken up for onboarding.

The Minister of Cooperation said that the way GeM had had its journey under Union Commerce and Industries Minister Piyush Goyal so far filled him with hopes for the future. He said that among these Rs 100-crore societies, 589 belonged to the state government and as of now, 289 of them had become associated with the GeM portal. Of the 54 multi-state cooperatives, 45 have become associated.

Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal and President of the National Cooperative Union of India (NCUI), Dileep Sanghani, were also present at this programme organized by the Ministry of Cooperation, the NCUI and GeM.

Piyush Goyal said that GeM became instrumental in making government procurement transparent, economical, high-quality and comprehensive. Through this portal, a change has been brought about in the life of every person in the country.

Dileep Sanghani said that it was a historic day for the cooperative sector in the country. Cooperatives will now expand from having a regional base to a national one, thanks to their being allowed to onboard on the GeM portal.  

With this e-launch, all eligible cooperatives will be able to start placing orders on the GeM portal. Recently, the Ministry of Cooperation in its advisory had made the NCUI the nodal agency to facilitate the onboarding of cooperatives, coordinating with GeM authorities and handholding the cooperatives in the process of onboarding.

The Union Cabinet under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had approved on June 1  to expand the mandate for GeM to allow cooperatives to procure goods and services through GeM. Cooperatives will not only get competitive prices through an open and transparent process, but can also procure from the large number of authenticated sellers/service providers available across the country on a single platform. Besides, this will lead to saving of time and reduction of administrative costs for cooperatives.

The GeM with active support from the Ministry of Cooperation and the NCUI has not only developed all software capabilities and organized training sessions but also reached all cooperative societies of Phase I. In fact, 60 per cent of the phase I cooperatives have already been registered for procurement. Cooperative societies like IFFCO, Kribhco, Nafed and Amul can start procurement right from today.

Incidentally, GeM has completed six years today. It was started by Prime Minister Modi to change the public procurement scenario. In terms of size — the number of buyers and sellers associated with the portal — GeM has become the world’s largest such portal. In terms of value, GeM ranks third or fourth in the world. It is to be noted that some other such portals in the world have been functioning for more than two decades.