Sustainable Procurement by strengthening an ecosystem for Local Green Enterprises (LGEs)

A technical session is being organised by TERI, GEC, DA and FICCI to discuss some of the challenges faced by local green enterprises in the context of sustainable public procurement and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.

Target 12.7 of SDG 12 is to promote public procurement practices that are sustainable, in accordance with national policies and priorities. The scale of public procurement in India is significant. According to Ministry of Finance (2018), India spends around 25 per cent of the GDP on public procurement. In 2006, the National Environment Policy of the Ministry of Environment and Forests explicitly mandated the public sector to encourage adoption of purchase preference for goods and services that met international environmental standards.

General Financial Rules (GFR) 2017 has provisions that purchasing authorities can include environmental criteria while making procurement; this has also been emphasised in the procurement manuals issued by the Ministry of Finance (MOF). While GFR has provisions for environmental criteria, there is a lacuna in terms of field implementation; it also remains restricted to certain products. In 2018, a sustainable public procurement task force was constituted by the Ministry of Finance with a mandate of reviewing best practices in public procurement, inventorise the current status on sustainable public procurement across government organisations in India, draft a Sustainable Procurement Action Plan and recommend a set of product/service categories where it can be implemented.