Context: Recently, Government e Marketplace (GeM) organised the fourth edition of the National Public Procurement Conclave (NPPC) in association with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).
About GeM

• The Government e-Marketplace is a dedicated online platform where goods and services can be procured by various organizations and departments under the Government of India, and by the PSUs also.
• GeM is aimed at enhancing the efficiency, speed and transparency in public procurement of goods and services. It also serves the objective of eliminating corruption.
• It is administered by the Ministry of Commerce and Industries under the Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals (DGS&D)
• It is a completely paperless, cashless and system-driven e-marketplace that enables the procurement of common use goods and services with a minimal human interface.
• It is an online marketplace for government officers and others for procurement.

About GeM 4.0
GeM 4.0 adds more features to the GeM platform. Some of the new features include:

• Timely payment to the sellers.
• Advanced search engine – NLP-based (Natural language Processing).
• Demand aggregation – Buyers would be able to collate multiple orders of the same product for various consignees across multiple organisations in the same Ministry.
• Staggered delivery – flexible delivery allowed.
• Redesigned bidding module by way of item-wise and consignee-wise bidding.
• Better grievance redressal mechanism in place.
• Portal is integrated with advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning.
• Revamped user interface.
• Price variance included in the platform making cataloguing easy for sellers.
• Ease of payment – GeM is integrating with multiple banks and ERPs.
• New categories and services.
• Seller rating introduced.
• Vendors and buyers would be able to interact with each other so that suitable requirements can be designed with market research.
• Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSEs) will now have dedicated pages.