INTRODUCTION
SEWA-supported women’s collective enterprises have seen government linkages as a crucial
way of providing livelihoods to our members. In line with this, SEWA Bharat and SEWA
Cooperative Federation have been working with our cooperatives and collective social
enterprises, as well as government authorities, for the past two years to facilitate the use of the
Government e-Marketplace(GeM) platform to enable links with public procurement. The GeM
portal is a major opportunity for MSMEs and informal sector enterprises to engage in
government tenders/contracts to provide their products and services.
Before GeM, the tendering process had conditions which were not possible for smaller
enterprises to meet. For example, contracts for tasks like street sweeping contained conditions
that enterprises own a certain number of dump trucks or pay a multi-lakh rupee deposit to
secure the contract, which disqualified our cooperatives/collective enterprises from offering
these services.
