The Government eMarketplace (GeM), the six-year-old public procurement website, is closing in on e-commerce giants Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart in terms of gross merchandise value (GMV). Prashant Kumar Singh, chief executive officer of GeM, recently said the portal would be the largest e-commerce platform in India by the end of the current financial year, crossing Amazon and Flipkart. Singh pegged the FY23 GMV target for GeM at Rs 2 trillion (around $25 billion). In FY22, GeM recorded a GMV of $14.2 billion, as against Amazon India’s $17 billion and Flipkart’s $23 billion. GeM is time-efficient as the turnaround time for award of contract on the platform is significantly lower than state-specific portals. This has reduced the share of cancelled tenders to single digit in several states. The portal also saves cost in the range of 8-10 per cent of GMV. If GeM manages to achieve the Rs 2-trillion target by FY23-end, it will save around Rs 20,000 crore to the public exchequer and public sector undertakings. The average order value per day has witnessed a six-fold jump, and the average number of orders per day has almost doubled in FY23 compared to FY21.