India aims to be world's design hub

India is gearing up to tap the huge engineering outsourcing opportunity and position itself as the world's hub for high value design and manufacturing destination, a top Nasscom official said on Monday.

"China may be the home for mass manufacturing, but India, with its high engineering base, can emerge as the destination for high value manufacturing," Nasscom president Kiran Karnik said.

Nasscom has initiated the engineering services forum and will build a brand for India as the outsourcing destination for engineering services, he said.

 Nasscom chairman and TCS CEO S Ramadorai said the market potential for outsourced engineering services was between $7 billion and $12 billion, while the value of work currently undertaken by India-based vendors in this space was estimated about $500 million.

"This does not include that of the captive units of global firms," he said, adding that the engineering services had been divided into IT services (R&D services) and ITES-BPO (engineering BPO).

Ramadorai said Indian firms like L&T, Thermax, Mahindra and Hero Global Design are major outsourcers and the target verticals for India are automotive, aerospace, construction, manufacturing and embedded software and chip design.

Satyam Computer Services Chairman and Nasscom vice-chairman Ramalinga Raju said India's IT services success could be replicated in the engineering services and India could compete with China by harnessing its strengths.

"India-based design teams result in price performance structures which are significantly lower than of US," he said.