The Government Goods and Services Procurement Policy Agency (LKPP) has frozen 13,600 imported products that have domestic substitutes out of the government’s e-catalogue in keeping with President Joko Widodo’s (Jokowi’s) instruction.
LKPP head Abdullah Azwar Anas said that the freezing of imported products from the e-catalogue has been implemented concurrently with affirmative actions to enable the inclusion of domestic-made and MSME (micro, small, and medium enterprise) products in the e-catalogue.
“There are now some 13,600 imported products with (domestic) substitutes that we have frozen, making them inaccessible in the e-catalogue,” he informed at a press conference after attending a closed-door meeting on the acceleration of goods and services procurement digital transformation, which was presided over by President Widodo at the Presidential Palace here on Thursday.
The suspension of imported products from the e-catalogue is expected to increase following the adoption of blockchain and big data technologies with state-owned communication company Telkom, he said.
After the President instructed the agency to simplify the platforming process, more domestic-made products have been made accessible on the e-catalogue, the agency head noted.
“Earlier, we needed eight stages, but now, we need only two stages (to include new products in the e-catalogue). Hence, if in the past, there were only 52 thousand products in the e-catalogue, we now have 600 thousand products,” Anas said.
Meanwhile, Minister of National Development Planning and head of the National Development Planning Agency, Suharso Monoarfa, said that President Widodo has asked government officials to prioritize domestic products for procurements made using state and regional budgets.
“The desired domestic-made products are products with high domestic component level (TKDN), not merely imported products with new packaging that have only 1–2 percent but are tagged as domestic products,” the minister added.
Besides planning to draft a regulation on the certification of domestic products for inclusion in the e-catalogue, the government is also targeting the inclusion of one million domestic-made products by year-end, he informed.
Source: Antara News