Para 1.7 — WORKS_MANUAL

ii) Central Public Procurement Portal Central Public Procurement Portal (CPPP) has been designed, developed and hosted by National Informatics Centre (NIC, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology) in association with Dept. of Expenditure to ensure transparency in the public procurement process. The primary objective of the Central Public Procurement portal is to provide a single point access to the information on procurements made across various Ministries and the Departments. The CPPP has e-publishing and e-procurement modules. It is mandatory for all Ministries/ Departments of the Central Government, Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSEs) and Autonomous and Statutory Bodies to publish on the CPPP all their tender enquiries and information about the resulting contracts. CPPP provides access to information such as documents relating to pre-qualification, Bidders’ enlistment, Bidding documents; details of bidders, their pre-qualification, enlistment, exclusions/ debarments; decisions taken regarding prequalification and selection of successful bid. GFR 2017 (Rule 160) makes it mandatory for Ministries/ Departments to receive all bids through eprocurement portals in respect of all procurements. Ministries/ Departments which do not have a large volume of procurement or carry out procurements required only for day-to-day running of offices and also have not initiated e-procurement through any other solution provided so far, may use e-procurement solution (CPPP) developed by NIC. Other Ministries/ Departments may either use e-procurement solution developed by NIC or engage any other service provider following due process. In the latter case, data on tenders are to be published on CPPP as well through web-service.

1.7 Public Procurement Infrastructure at the Centre i) Procurement Policy Division Procurement Policy Division (PPD) in Department of Expenditure; Ministry of Finance has been created to encourage uniformity and harmonisation in public procurement processes by setting guidelines, dissemination of best practices, providing guidance, oversight and capacity building and issuing of procurement manuals. However, Centralisation of procurement or involvement in procurement processes is not the intended purpose of creation of PPD.

iii) Government e-Marketplace (GeM) To ensure better transparency and higher efficiency an online Government e-Marketplace (GeM– an e-commerce marketplace) has been developed for common use goods and services. In GeM product or services are offered by a number of eligible sellers and all the eligible buyers can view/ compare all the product/ services and select the product/ services offered by any one of the seller. In general, because online marketplaces aggregate product/ services from a wide array of providers, selection is usually wider, availability is higher, and prices are more competitive than in vendor-specific online retail stores. The procurement process on GeM is online and electronic - end to end from placement of supply order to payment to suppliers. The registration of suppliers on GeM is online and automatic based on ID authentication etc. The procuring authorities have to assess the reasonability of rates. Buyer’s transactions are processed by the GeM portal and then product/ services are delivered and fulfilled directly by the participating sellers. Tools of reverse bidding and e-auction are also available which can be utilised for the procurement of bulk quantities. More details are available in Rule 149, GFR, 2017. The Procurement of Goods and Services by Ministries or Departments are mandatory for Goods or Services available on GeM. Ministries/ Departments are expected to work with GeM in making available on the GeM platform as many products/ services by making available such Goods and Services which are regularly procured by them.