Union Home and Cooperation Minister, Amit Shah will e-launch the onboarding of cooperatives on the GeM portal on Tuesday in New Delhi. Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Piyush Goyal and President of the National Cooperative Union of India, Dileep Sanghani will also be present at this program organised by the Ministry of Cooperation (Govt. of India), the NCUI and GeM.
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 cooperatives through the process of on-boarding.
NCUI has compiled a list of cooperatives with turnover/deposits of Rs. 100 crore and forwarded this information to GeM for starting the onboarding process. 589 cooperatives have been shortlisted as eligible for onboarding.
NCUI has written to all cooperative federations and conducted virtual meetings of national and state federations and of eligible cooperatives sector-wise to apprise them of the benefits of the GeM portal.
A joint task force of NCUI and GeM officials has been formed to call and mail individual cooperatives to urge them for onboarding and handholding through the registration.
A Helpdesk of the GeM technical team has been established at NCUI to help cooperatives with the entire process.
GeM has been set up as the National procurement portal to provide an end-to-end online marketplace for Central and State Govt depts/ Ministries, PSUs, etc for common-use goods and services in a transparent and efficient manner.
Till now GeM was not enabled for registration of cooperative societies as buyers on the platform. The Union Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has approved on June 1st of expanding 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 about 45 lakh authenticated sellers/service providers available across the country on a single platform. Besides, this will lead to the saving of time and reduction of administrative costs for cooperatives.
The onboarding of cooperative societies and co-op banks will be done in a phased manner. In the first phase, cooperative societies and banks with turnover/deposits of more than Rs. 100 crores as per the latest audited financial statement and with A Grade auditing have been taken up for onboarding.