Writing a Good Project Proposal and
Getting It Accepted

Project proposals are very much essential in the research field. With the help of project proposal, you can think of the practical use of your product to the industry or society with whom you are collaborating. It also helps in completing your research and delivering the product which you promised to the organization on time. You need not have to worry about the financial help to attend conferences, fabricate any prototype and enjoy doing work in timely manner. Writing a good project proposal need your full attention and devotion as you are telling a funding agency to give you the financial help to benefit both. First of all choose the funding agency from where you want to get the fund. It can be an industry or Government departments. After that see whether you know someone or with whom you can contact. If you know someone in the industry, then he/she can guide you towards the challenges they are facing. Keeping that in mind, you can write about the solution to their problems. In this way you will be writing the things which they are interested in. Any project proposal has some basic elements which can be used in writing to any funding agency. The first component is title. Give the title of the project which is very brief and to the point. After that comes abstract of your work. It is same as what you see in the research papers. Not too long and to the point mentioning about the subject and how you can solve it. Then you write the objectives of the project. It can be in point form clearly stating your objectives which you will be achieving in this project. The budget part comes next. This is a very important part of any proposal. Discuss with your supervisor and team on what things to purchase and how to divide the money. The next comes the current state of art technology/ literature survey. Do a thorough survey and include the latest papers in it. Nobody wants you to stick to very old papers. Then comes the motivation and scopes. Motivation is that part of the proposal where you want to tell what motivated you to do the research about whom you are writing. Scope tells what this project has in future or in present and how far your research can help to the present scenario and industry as a whole. Methodology and research plan part of the project tells you the stepwise procedure of how you will implement your objectives. Bench marks, milestone and timeframe is the part where you will be giving the tentative time when you will be completing your said objectives/milestones. Milestones are more or less same as objectives. Benchmark tells you which standards you will follow in carrying out the experiments, like you will be using standard instruments (ISO certified or IEEE standards etc.). You can mention the equipments, infrastructure you have in the host institute which will be used to implement the research. This will help you in telling the funding agency that your base is build, just you want to extend that base for the need of industry. No one is interested to fund you building your base (full lab setup). You can do some theoretical studies and simulations to show the funding agency some visible positive results. Finally comes the potential users and final outcomes where you will be mentioning the industries which will be interested in your product. Final outcome will tell you what this project will give back to the funding industry after completion.

Amit Baghel Research Scholar, EEE Department E-mail: a.baghel@iitg.ernet.in