New Delhi, Jan 17 (UNI) With the target to reach out to all stakeholders and learn from their experiences on GeM portal, a two month long national outreach programme 'GeM Samvaad' was launched to reach out to stakeholders across the country.
The programme, launched on December 17 last year, will facilitate on-boarding of local sellers on the marketplace while catering to specific requirements and procurement needs of buyers.
The outreach programme took off from 19th December 2019 and during the launch week, the States of Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh were covered.
GeM Samvaad is being conducted in all States and Union Territories. After the first four states the outreach programme has been held in J & K on January 5, Ladakh on January 7, Assam and Bihar on January 9 and in Chandigarh on January 8.
All the outreach programmes witnessed overwhelming participation of buyers and sellers. GeM senior officers are steering the programmes. They are also interacting with buyers and sellers attending the events.
Arrangements for the outreach programmes including logistics are made by the respective State Governments.
The target is to reach out to all stakeholders and learn from their experiences on their usage of GeM portal.
Through this outreach programme, GeM expects to make the actual users aware about the new features and functionalities of the portal and collect feedback, which is the first step towards GeM’s ‘Voice of Customer’ initiative.
A Roundtable with Ministries and Departments and Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSEs) was held on January 14 as part of GeM Samvaad.
More than 100 participants including Financial Advisors and nodal officers of Ministries, Departments, and representatives of CPSEs participated in the Roundtable and shared their feedback, challenges and suggestions.
GeM is continuously working to bring all the items on-board and buyers should accelerate this process by providing specifications of categories and asking sellers to onboard GeM. He further emphasized the importance of timely payments to sellers and stated that buyers should ensure payments to sellers on time.
GeM has more than 15 lakh products and around 20,000 services, more than 3 lakh registered sellers and service providers and more than 40,000 Government buyer organizations.
In its short journey of three years, GeM has processed more than 28 lakh orders worth Rs 40,000 crore in Gross Merchandise Value out of which 50 per cent has been transacted by MSMEs, according to a statement here on Friday.
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