Country Of Origin Made Mandatory For Govt e-Marketplace (GeM) Platform

Furthering NDA government's initiatives of 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' or 'Make in India', an online trading platform for state-run agencies - Government e-Marketplace (GeM), has made it mandatory for sellers to mention 'country of origin' on products they wish to sell through the platform.

"Information about Country of Origin by the sellers made mandatory on GeM," Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in a tweet.

Further, sellers, who had already uploaded their products before making the new feature mandatory are being prompted regularly to update the Country of Origin, with a warning that their products shall be removed from GeM if they fail to update the same.

GeM now also has a provision for the indication of the percentage of local content in products.

With this new feature, now, the Country of Origin as well as the local content percentage are visible in the marketplace for all items. Further, the 'Make in India' filter has now been enabled on the portal.

"Buyers can choose to buy only those products that meet the minimum 50% local content criteria. In case of Bids, Buyers can now reserve any bid for Class I Local suppliers (Local Content > 50%). For those Bids below INR 200 crore, only Class I and Class II Local Suppliers (Local content > 50% and > 20% respectively) are eligible to bid, with Class I supplier getting purchase preference. Some Snapshots of the Local Content Features on the GeM Portal are shown in Annexure," a statement from the Ministry of Commerce & Industry said.