The World Bank estimates public procurement at roughly 20 percent of India’s GDP, putting the wider opportunity at about ₹70 lakh crore. Government e Marketplace (GeM) alone, the portal through which ministries, PSUs and departments buy everything from stationery to steel, completed ten years this August with ₹20 lakh crore in cumulative purchases. Its annual buying rose from ₹422 crore in its first full year to more than ₹5 lakh crore in each of the last two. GeM took over eight years to reach its first ₹10 lakh crore, then less than two to reach the next.
The opportunity is immense. Access to it is not.
A Large Market, Scattered Across Systems
GeM is only one channel. Defence procurement alone stands at ₹6.81 lakh crore in the FY2025-26 budget, while infrastructure capital expenditure is ₹11.21 lakh crore, much of it routed through other systems. Central tenders above ₹25 lakh appear on CPPP. Railways uses IREPS. Defence has defproc.gov.in. States use portals under GePNIC, while PSUs such as Coal India, NTPC and Indian Oil publish separately.
Financial rules require e-procurement above a threshold, but they do not require one common portal. By tender trackers’ estimates, a serious bidder must watch more than 30 portals, each with its own login, search logic and deadlines. Even a mid-sized manufacturer or EPC contractor with a business development team cannot realistically cover them all.
Digital procurement has widened participation. MSEs have won over ₹9 lakh crore on GeM, accounting for 45.6 per cent of cumulative purchases and comfortably exceeding the mandated quota. An IIT Delhi study of 101 items from FY2023-24 to FY 2025-26 also found GeM prices lower in 74.3 per cent of cases, with savings of 13.6 per cent. But a more efficient portal cannot help a capable business compete for a tender it never saw.
“When we sit with a mid-size manufacturer, the most common thing we hear isn’t that they lost a bid. It’s that they never knew the tender existed until after it closed. That’s not a capability problem. That’s a discovery problem, and it’s a solvable one.”
-Pankaj Modi, Founder, Tender247
The Cost of Not Knowing
That blindspot is the business of Tender247. The company tracks tenders from government bodies, public sector companies and large private buyers across hundreds of portals, then helps businesses identify the opportunities that match their capabilities.
Most tendering work happens before a bid is submitted: finding relevant notices, checking what competitors quoted last time, preparing documents, managing deadlines and keeping a team aligned. Tender247 brings that work into one system. Its AI identifies relevant tenders, automates paperwork and gives teams a shared view of the process. The company says this can cut the time required for a bid by roughly 90 percent, allowing even a small team to pursue far moreopportunities.
“Large contractors have always had someone whose entire job was tracking portals and pricing out rivals. We turned that role into a smart subscription.”
–Pankaj Modi, Founder, Tender247
Taking Tender Intelligence Mainstream
This week, Tender247 announced Anupam Kher as its brand ambassador in what the company says is the tender industry’s first celebrity association. The choice is unusual by design. A category long sold through trade directories and cold calls is being introduced to India’s boardrooms with the familiarity of a consumer brand.
“India’s businesses are not asking for favours. They are asking to see the same information the big players have always had. If my face on a hoarding makes one factory owner in Rajkot check which tenders opened in his sector last month, this association has done its work.”
– Anupam Kher
Making the Market Easier to Read
The association is therefore not just about visibility. Tender247 also plans to publish quarterly intelligence on the market, beginning with a figure the industry rarely sees: the total value of tenders that receive no competing bid at all.
That may be the larger ambition: not simply to help businesses find more tenders, but to make one of India’s largest markets easier for more of them to read, understand and enter.
