Winning government hospital tenders in India (GeM and state portals)

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Part of Selling AI to Indian Hospitals, a field guide.

There are two doors into an Indian hospital, and they could not be more different. One is the private hospital, where you sell to a person or a committee. The other is the government hospital, where you don’t sell to anyone. You win a tender. Founders who are good at the first door often lose badly at the second, because a tender is not a sales process. It is a procurement process with its own rules, and the rules decide the winner before anyone sees your product.

At BeyondChats we sell into both worlds, and the government one catches people out. Here is how public hospital procurement actually works in India, and how to decide whether it’s a door worth walking through at all.

The four things to understand, in one line each:

1. Where tenders live: GeM and the state e-procurement portals, not your inbox.
2. Eligibility clauses: turnover, experience and certifications can disqualify you before page one.
3. L1 pricing: the lowest compliant bid usually wins, and the demo rarely changes that.
4. Which door to pick: tenders are a different game; choose it deliberately, not by accident.

1. Where government tenders actually live

Government hospitals buy through public procurement channels, not through a founder’s LinkedIn DM. The two you need to know: GeM (Government e-Marketplace), the central portal where a great deal of public buying now happens, and the state e-procurement portals (each state runs its own for departmental and hospital tenders). If you are not registered and watching these, you simply never see the opportunity. It opens, runs its window, and closes without you.

The practical first step is boring and essential: register as a seller on GeM and the relevant state portals, get your documents in order, and set up a way to monitor new tenders in your category. Most of “winning tenders” is just being present and eligible when one appears.

2. Eligibility clauses can disqualify you before the demo

Every tender carries eligibility criteria, and they are where most young companies fall out. Common ones: a minimum annual turnover (often a multiple of the contract value), a number of years in business, proof of past similar work (you’ve done this for another hospital or government body), and specific certifications (ISO, data-security, sometimes empanelment). Miss one and your bid is rejected on technical grounds, and nobody even looks at what you built.

Read the eligibility section first, before you invest a day in the bid. If you don’t qualify, there are legitimate routes: bid as a consortium with a larger, eligible partner, or target smaller tenders whose thresholds you clear. What you cannot do is wish the clauses away; they are checked mechanically.

3. L1 pricing: the lowest compliant bid usually wins

This is the single hardest thing for a product-led founder to accept. Much of Indian public procurement runs on L1: the lowest-priced technically-compliant bid wins. Once you clear the eligibility and technical bar, the deciding variable is often price, not polish. The beautiful demo that wins private deals carries far less weight here; if a compliant competitor bids lower, they usually win.

What this means in practice: (a) know your true floor price before you bid, because you may need to be near it; (b) don’t burn weeks on a lavish pitch when the evaluation is largely mechanical; and (c) if your product’s value is genuinely premium and you can’t or won’t compete on price, a pure L1 tender may not be your fight. Some tenders use QCBS (quality-and-cost-based scoring) that gives technical merit real weight; those are the ones a differentiated product should hunt for. Read the evaluation method before you commit.

4. Pick your door deliberately

The mistake is drifting into the tender world by accident, chasing a government logo because it feels prestigious, and then losing to price while your private pipeline goes cold. Tenders have long cycles, heavy paperwork, delayed payments and thin margins. They can also be large, sticky and reference-building. Both things are true.

So decide on purpose. If you’re an early company with a differentiated product and limited paperwork muscle, the private door (committee or owner-doctor) is usually where you should start: faster cycles, room to sell on value. Come to tenders once you’re eligible, can absorb slow payment, and have the margin to compete. Walking through the government door deliberately is fine; stumbling through it is expensive.

This is part of what I’m writing about here: selling and building AI for Indian healthcare, in public. If that’s your world too, here’s why I started writing, and the monthly letter below is where the numbers and the messier lessons go.

More in the field guide: the private door is a different read: who actually signs? And whichever door you pick, the pilot still has to convert: the pilot that actually converts. Or see all the guides.