The e-Procurement project implemented by the Information Technology and Communications (IT&C) Department of the State Government has won "The Gold Icon award" under the exemplary implementation of e-governance initiative category.

C1 India Private Limited and the state government have implemented this project in a Public Private Partnership Model (PPP).

The Deputy Prime Minister, LK Advani, presented the awards during the Seventh National e-Governance Conference held in Chennai today.

The award was received by JC Mohanty, Principal Secretary, Department of IT&C, and Vivek Agarwal, President & COO of C1 India.

The e-procurement project was chosen for this award among 51 entries submitted by various states and central government departments for this category.

These awards are in recognition for the best eGovernance projects implemented by Government departments and Indian states and are awarded by the department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances, Government of India.

"It was a difficult project as it was the first project of its kind in the country. The project posed many implementation challenges as it involved a lot of change management. This project has not only reduced tender processing time but has also substantially reduced costs for the government and made the tendering process transparent and accessible," according to Vivek Agarwal.

J C Mohanty, Principal Secretary, IT&C Department said, "the progress of the eProcurement project in Andhra Pradesh has been extremely encouraging and the government has decided to float all the tenders of more than Rs 10 lakh in case of Panchayathi Raj Engineering dept more than Rs 2 lakhs on the e-procurement platform for the year 2004-2005.

e-Procurement implementation for the Government of AP is the largest Government to Business (G2B) platform in the country and is among the largest internet based eGovernance applications. C1 India now plans to take this project across various States and Central Government Departments.

The project is expected to generate online transactions worth Rs. 2500 crores by the end of the current financial year.

Some of the key benefits of the project are: Cost saving to the government to the tune of 20-30 percent of the estimated contract value of the tenders.

It has prevented and discouraged cartelisation and has increased competition as is evident from the average number of bidders per tender.

The average number of bidders has increased from 3 bidders to 6 bidders, tender processing time has decreased from 5 months to 1-1/2 months.

All state government departments are targeted to be online with eProcurement by the end of 2004.