Many hurdles to cross to achieve Nasscom’s $100 bn engineering R&D goal

Nasscom may look to achieve $100 billion by 2025 goal for India’s engineering research and development sector, but experts believe several factors right from government policies to availability of talent will be needed to be sorted to achieve the target.

The Indian ER&D sector already employs about 7,00,000 people in the country, which could rise to one million by 2025 in a favourable atmosphere , experts said.

Karthikeyan Natarajan, global head for engineering, IOT and enterprise mobility at Tech Mahindra said, “We have to stretch to get here and several aspects will need to fall into place. We will need government support in aspects like incentives for setting up facilities and creating talent skills. The government could also boost the sector by helping set up centres of excellence to showcase skills in various technologies.”

The ER&D sector is growing faster than the core IT sector business as global companies across industries begin to outsource larger part of their engineering research.

Earlier this month, TCS acquired more than 1,200 General Motors employees in a deal worth over $500 million over five years, one of the largest in the ER&D space.

Several companies are setting up R&D facilities in India. About 40 R&D global captive centres were set up in 2018. Yet, software industry association Nasscom’s target seems ambitious. “The sector will reach $75 billion by 2025 with the way we are growing now; it is the additional $25 billion that we are focusing on getting,” said KS Viswanathan, vice-president for industry initiatives at Nasscom.

To achieve that, the industry needs to tap different markets. It also needs to ensure availability of skilled talent who can create a product culture with expertise in product management and to bridge the domain gap.

Nasscom is looking at changing the branding of the country to make it clear that India is not just a service outsourcing destination but also a good product destination.