Karnataka to take e-way for government procurement

The e-procurement programme was launched by the e-governance department on a PPP model with Hewlett-Packard (HP). Besides ensuring transparency in bidding and procuring process, e-version also reduces transaction time.

Since every year various government departments floats tender worth Rs 24,000 crore for procurement which accounts to almost 50-60 per cent of department fund allocation, it accelerates decision making and delivery of service to citizen’s door step. “The e-procurement initiative was introduced in six government departments including PWD, SSA by Centre for e-governance for six months as a pilot project in 2008. Currently 31 government departments are using e-procurement platform and close to Rs 7,000 crore worth of tenders are carried out. We are planning to bring all government departments under this by end of this fiscal,” said E-governance Principal Secretary M N Vidyashankar.

The objective is to create an end-to-end platform for handling all stages of procurement. This has created maximum participation of bidders. “We are receiving bids from north eastern states and have seen increase in number of bids and also competition. In addition, the government is able to receive tenders at 20- 32 per cent lesser rates than it estimated,” he added. The e-procurement solution is hosted on the state central servers and solution is purely developed on an open source.

Technology partner HP provides blade servers, SAN storage boxes, and other IT infrastructure. The alliance with HP is a revenue sharing arrangement, with HP getting paid for every transaction of tenders coming online. HP also operates a support desk for users, six days a week and offers user guides and develops other training manuals.

The State government wants other central government institutions to use e-tendering platform and submitted a presentation of the e-tendering to World Bank for enhancement of the facilty .