The Engineering Forum had adopted a four pronged approach to achieve its growth targets:

• Improving the impact of Government

The Forum aims to sensitise Government about the growing sector, so that it can be recognised as a separate industry as as software or hardware. The Forum is also working to ensure that Research too gets acknowledged as a separate category. It’s aim is to foster collaboration between government institutions and industry, in order to encourage innovation.

Additionally the Engineering Forum is undertaking the following:

• Enabling engineering services organisations to manufacture prototypes within SEZ areas
• Helping organisations involved in reengineering, component design or testing services to import components and derive duty benefits
• Helping the co-location of electronic manufacturing in IT-BPO SEZ facilities and promoting the seamless use of high-end software between STP and SEZ units
• Facilitating single window clearances for execution of engineering services, through unification of STP and SEZ jurisdictions that allow the speedier processing of permissions
• Ensuring that direct and indirect taxation benefits like deemed exports status for non-EOUs that provide services for export of engineering services, are availed by ER&D organisations
• Helping take EOU benefits to testing labs and subsidised loans to SMEs for setting up labs
• Spurring government to invest in setting up assembly or testing units and provide investment subsidies to such units
• Developing the ecosystem
  
  • The Forum is helping improve access to infrastructure through:
    
    • Joint sponsorship of key test labs and proto manufacturing facilities on a PPP model that can be showcased
    • Stronger collaboration between Design and Manufacturing capabilities
  • It is enabling the development of Innovation Clusters by:
    
    • Promoting tax breaks, availability of loans and financing, investment credits, etc. for local and regional innovation
    • Encouraging commercialisation of R&D (in universities) by assisting students and faculty to take their innovations to market
  • It is specifically focusing on SMEs to enable them to take active part in realising India’s Engineering Services vision
• Building the brand of the Engineering Services sector by:
  
  • Improving the perception about Indian vendors. The Forum does this by:
• Improving the industry’s connect with academia
  
  • The Forum is focusing on higher Education:
    
    • It is proposing the conferring of an explicit Core Engineering Diploma for 4-6 months similar to finishing school type courses in specific verticals in addition to regular B.Tech curriculum.
    • It is suggesting a similar advanced diploma for teachers and working professionals to create a larger talent pool with adequate skill sets
    • Periodic joint academia and industry workshops focused on core engineering
    • It is working to ensure higher cooperation between research institutes, industry and academia, leading to well-rounded skill development of teachers
    • The Forum is helping develop specialised programmes within vertical domains and special scholarship programmes for deserving students
    • It is sending industry experts into academic institutions as guest faculties
    • The Forum is expanding the NAC-Tech assessment for Engineering specific areas
  • Enhancing employability
    
    • The Forum is helping improve the curriculum and making it contemporary with live case studies
    • It is creating soft-skill opportunities through “beyond core” activities
    • The Forum is calling for high-caliber post graduate courses (M-Tech, PhDs) in select universities across engineering streams for working professionals
  • Building domain capabilities
    
    • Identifying 2-3 leading universities in each discipline and evolve them as ‘centers of excellence’ with significant academic and administrative autonomy
    • Certifying engineers for industry verticals/specific skills
  • Augmenting capacity
    
    • The Forum is looking at a comprehensive programme to build Ph.D capacity in India and encourage the industry to partner with universities
    • It is collaborating with higher education institutes to develop fellowship programmes for increasing the number of Ph.Ds in the country