Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is partnering the government to build its e-market platform GeM (Government e-Marketplace) for public procurement.

The country’s largest IT services firm on Tuesday announced that it has been selected as a strategic partner by the Centre to transform the GeM into a state-of-the-art public procurement platform with enhanced transparency, efficiency, and inclusivity.

The GeM platform provides an end-to-end online marketplace for central and state government bodies, including public sector undertakings, for procurement of common use goods and services in a transparent and efficient manner.

It currently handles a gross merchandise value (GMV) of over Rs 2 lakh crore purchased by over 70,000 buyer organizations from over 6.5 million sellers and service providers, including over 800,000 medium and small enterprises.

TCS pointed out that the current platform, while successful, has architectural challenges in scaling up and in meeting the evolving needs of buyers and sellers.

The partnership will see TCS design and build a new modern solution leveraging new technologies, while maintaining the current platform.

It disclosed that the new GeM platform will be based on e-commerce and e-marketplace principles with multi-tenancy, multi-rule, multilingual, open source,
and open-API-based architecture.

Further, it will also be highly scalable, designed to accommodate the anticipated six-fold growth in GMV over the next six years. The new platform will be designed for interoperability and cloud neutrality, making it technology agnostic and vendor-independent.

TCS said that it will also design a better user experience for all stakeholders.