Ten years ago, the Indian government was buying paperclips and computers the old way — opaque, slow, and riddled with middlemen. Today, Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal has marked the tenth anniversary of the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) by pointing to a number that stops you cold: the platform's Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) has surged from ₹422 crore to over ₹1,55,000 crore — a transformation that has rewritten how the Indian state spends its money.

From a Pilot to a Procurement Powerhouse

GeM was launched on 9 August 2016 as a modest pilot for central government procurement, embedded within the broader Digital India programme approved in 2015. The ambition was straightforward: replace fragmented, paper-heavy tendering with a single, transparent digital marketplace. What followed was anything but modest. Over a decade, the portal has grown into the primary procurement channel for government ministries and departments, cutting cycle times, improving price discovery, and generating documented savings for the exchequer.

Goyal's post on 10 August 2026 — marking the #10YearsOfGeM milestone — frames the platform not merely as an efficiency tool but as an instrument of grassroots economic inclusion. 'Grassroots empowerment is not merely a slogan,' he wrote, 'but a genuine commitment.'

12.28 Lakh MSEs, 42,000 Startups — and 2.25 Lakh Women Sellers

The headline numbers are the vendor-side figures. Over 12.28 lakh Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) are now registered on the portal, including more than 2.25 lakh enterprises led by women. More than 42,000 startups have also joined, alongside Self Help Groups, artisans, and weavers — categories that historically had no seat at the government-procurement table.

This aligns directly with the Public Procurement Policy for Micro and Small Enterprises, which was revised in 2012 and later calibrated to GeM onboarding targets, mandating a minimum share of government purchases from the MSE sector. GeM operationalised that mandate at scale. For a woman-run weaver cooperative in a tier-3 town, access to a ₹1.55 lakh crore marketplace — without a broker, without a middleman, without knowing the right official — is a structural shift, not a statistic.

Vocal for Local, Make in India — and the Viksit Bharat Arc

Goyal explicitly ties GeM's trajectory to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's flagship economic frameworks: Make in India, announced in September 2014 to boost domestic manufacturing and reduce import dependence, and Vocal for Local, which pushes government and citizens to preference Indian-made goods. GeM enforces these preferences structurally — procurement rules on the platform can mandate local content, giving domestic producers a built-in advantage over importers.

The minister describes @GeM_India as 'a key driver of self-reliance' and a foundation for Viksit Bharat — the government's official vision for a developed India by 2047. The framing is deliberate: public procurement, which accounts for a significant share of GDP in any large economy, is positioned as an active lever of industrial policy, not just administrative housekeeping.

What the Auditors and the Next Annual Report Will Reveal

The GMV figure is a measure of orders placed through the platform — the sharper test is how much of that translated into realised savings against benchmark prices, and whether vendor quality and delivery timelines held up at scale. The next Comptroller and Auditor General review of GeM, along with the platform's annual report, will be the independent scoreboard. Possible updates to the General Financial Rules incorporating GeM data could further institutionalise the platform's role across all tiers of government spending.

A ₹422 crore marketplace in 2016. A ₹1,55,000 crore marketplace in 2026. The question now is whether the governance infrastructure — dispute resolution, quality assurance, payment timelines for small vendors — can keep pace with the scale it has already achieved.