PIB TrackerGeM crosses ₹18.4 lakh crore cumulative procurement
India's central e-procurement marketplace reports a cumulative value milestone, with small enterprises and women-led units taking a rising share of the spend.
What happened
- The Government e Marketplace (GeM) has recorded a cumulative Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of ₹18.4 lakh crore since it began operations — the total value of orders routed through the platform over its lifetime.
- In the single financial year 2025-26, the platform crossed ₹5 lakh crore GMV, its strongest annual throughput so far.
- GeM's CEO, Shri Mihir Kumar, framed the milestone as a reflection of growing buyer, seller and institutional confidence in the platform.
- During FY 2025-26, Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) executed 68% of all orders and accounted for 47.1% of total GMV — nearly half the money flowing through the marketplace went to small firms.
- More than 11 lakh MSEs were registered, receiving over 51 lakh orders worth ₹2.36 lakh crore, a growth above 20%.
- Procurement routed by State governments grew 38.3% in FY 2025-26, signalling deeper adoption beyond Central ministries.
Background & context
Public procurement — the purchase of goods, works and services by government departments, attached offices, autonomous bodies and public-sector undertakings — is one of the largest single streams of public spending in India. Historically this was handled through the manual Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals (DGS&D), the central purchase organisation that ran rate contracts on paper. That system was slow, paper-heavy and opaque, with limited price discovery and weak audit trails.
To replace it, the Government e Marketplace was launched in 2016 as a dedicated online platform for end-to-end public procurement. It was conceived as a "no-cost-to-buyer" national marketplace where any registered government buyer can purchase common-use goods and services, and the manual DGS&D rate-contract system was wound down in favour of GeM. GeM operates under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, through the Department of Commerce, and is run by a Special Purpose Vehicle — GeM SPV, a Section 8 (not-for-profit) company — created to build and manage the platform.
The platform's design goals are transparency, efficiency, speed and inclusion. By moving procurement online, GeM aims to compress the buying cycle, create open price discovery through competitive bidding and reverse auctions, leave a complete digital audit trail, and widen the supplier base so that small, first-time and disadvantaged sellers can reach the entire government as a single customer. The FY 2025-26 figures in this release are best read as a progress report against those original objectives — particularly the inclusion goal, where the share captured by small and women-led enterprises is the headline.
GeM sits inside a wider public-procurement reform architecture that an aspirant should be able to place side by side. The headline rulebook is the General Financial Rules (GFR), 2017, which made procurement of common goods and services through GeM the default route for government buyers and embedded the platform in the financial-discipline framework. Alongside it runs the Public Procurement (Preference to Make in India) Order, which steers government buying toward domestic suppliers, and the long-standing Public Procurement Policy for Micro and Small Enterprises, which sets a procurement-from-MSE target with sub-targets reserved for SC/ST-owned and women-owned units. The MSE, women-led, SC/ST and startup shares reported in this release are precisely the metrics those policies are written to move — which is why GeM publishes them as its primary scorecard rather than reporting throughput alone.
The platform also rides on the broader Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) idea India has pursued — the same family of thinking that produced Aadhaar-based identity, UPI for payments and the account-aggregator framework for data. In that lineage GeM is the procurement layer: a shared, rules-based digital rail that many participants plug into, rather than a one-off application. Understanding GeM as DPI rather than as a single website explains why its growth compounds — every new State, ministry or seller that onboards increases the platform's value to every other participant.
For Prelims
- Full form: Government e Marketplace — the unified online platform for public procurement by government buyers.
- Launch year: 2016, replacing the manual DGS&D rate-contract system as the central purchase route.
- Nodal ministry: Ministry of Commerce and Industry, through the Department of Commerce; built and operated by the GeM SPV, a Section 8 not-for-profit company.
- Cumulative GMV: ₹18.4 lakh crore lifetime; over ₹5 lakh crore added in FY 2025-26 alone.
- MSE share (FY 2025-26): 68% of orders and 47.1% of GMV; 11 lakh+ MSEs registered; 51 lakh+ orders worth ₹2.36 lakh crore.
- Women-led MSEs: 2.1 lakh+ registered, orders exceeding ₹28,000 crore (~28% growth).
- SC/ST MSEs: orders over ₹6,000 crore (~28% growth); startups: orders over ₹19,000 crore (36%+ growth).
- Technology layer: AI/ML for catalogue validation, pre-sanity checks, real-time anomaly detection, abnormal-pricing and collusive-bidding detection, and Bid Health Scores.
- State adoption: procurement by States grew 38.3% in FY 2025-26.
- Type: a digital-governance / e-governance platform and a procurement reform — not a welfare scheme, not a subsidy, and not a stock exchange.
Why it matters
The significance of GeM lies less in the headline number and more in what the number represents: a shift in how the State spends money. Three problems are being addressed at once. First, transparency and integrity — manual procurement was prone to favouritism, padded rate contracts and weak audit trails; an online marketplace with competitive bidding, reverse auctions and AI-driven anomaly detection narrows the discretion at which leakage occurs. The Bid Health Scores and collusive-bidding detection mentioned in the release are direct answers to cartelisation, a long-standing weakness of tendering.
Second, efficiency and price discovery — pooling the entire government's demand onto one platform lets buyers compare prices instantly and lets sellers reach every department at once, compressing a procurement cycle that once took months. Third, and most prominent in this release, inclusion. Public procurement is one of the most powerful levers a government has to shape an economy, because the State is the single largest buyer. By steering 47.1% of GMV to MSEs and tracking the shares going to women-led units, SC/ST entrepreneurs and startups, GeM turns routine purchasing into a tool of inclusive growth — giving small and first-time suppliers guaranteed access to a vast, creditworthy customer. The 38.3% jump in State procurement matters because it shows the platform spreading from a Central-ministry tool into a genuinely national one, multiplying all three effects.
There is a fiscal dimension as well. Because the State is buying at the scale of lakhs of crores, even small percentage savings from open price discovery translate into very large absolute savings on the exchequer — a recurring claim made for the platform is that aggregated competitive buying lowers the unit price the government pays compared with fragmented manual purchase. For the seller side, prompt and predictable payment against a government order improves the working-capital position of small firms that otherwise struggle with delayed receivables; this is part of why guaranteed access to government demand is treated as a credit and survival lever for MSEs, not merely a sales channel. The inclusion numbers and the integrity tools therefore reinforce each other: a transparent, audit-rich marketplace is also the one in which a small or first-time supplier can compete on price without needing connections, which is exactly what the rising MSE and women-led shares are meant to demonstrate.
At the same time, the figures should be read with care. A large GMV share for MSEs measures the value of orders placed, not the depth or durability of participation, and a platform can still see activity concentrate among a relatively small set of capable suppliers. The very fact that GeM deploys AI to watch for abnormal pricing and collusive bidding is an admission that integrity risk migrates rather than disappears when procurement goes digital. These caveats are what make GeM a richer Mains example than a simple success story — it lets an answer hold both the achievement and its limits in view.