The Government will purchase everything via e-platform. This has been decided by the Prime Minister Modi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to move all government purchases, from paper clips to power plant turbines, to an Amazon-like online marketplace that could eventually be worth a fifth of the country’s $2 trillion economy.
The e-market is at the center of Modi’s key reforms: ‘Digital India,’ aimed at increasing the ease of doing business in the notoriously red tape-heavy country, ‘Make in India,’ which seeks to boost the domestic manufacturing industry, and demonetization, which is attempting to tackle unaccounted cash and corruption. Modi, whose cabinet assigned $16.5 billion in Dec. 2014 for a three-year digital push, needs the plan to sustain India’s 7 percent-plus growth rate.
Narendra Modi’s government, which on Nov. 8 announced a sudden decision to replace 86 percent of India’s cash in a bid to cut corruption and move to a cashless economy, has much riding on the new online market, which has already traded 390 million rupees ($5.7 million) since it began in August.
“The transparency and competitiveness it has brought is very encouraging and so far we’ve seen that the government’s savings are at least 10 percent on every transaction, on digital purchaes.
The portal is expected to support trades worth 20 percent of India’s GDP once all state governments, state-owned companies, utilities, defense and railways come online, said Vishal Singh, additional director at the National e-governance division, which set up the platform.
But with only 20 percent Indians able to access the internet, the government — India’s biggest employer — faces the challenge of training staff across the country to use the digital marketplace. Departments as diverse as finance, municipal corporations, police, hospitals and post offices, some located in villages where regular power failures make internet access difficult, are expected to be involved.
It is designed to leave a digital trail that will allow unprecedented openness in a nation ranked 76th on Transparency International’s 167-nation corruption index. Bureaucratic delays and corruption were cited as among the biggest obstacles to business in India by the World Bank’s 2014 Enterprise survey.
