When chipmaker Texas Instruments set up shop in Bangalore in 1984, a photograph was taken at the office’s doorstep of wooden crates being carefully unloaded from a bullock cart as an employee looks on. The grainy image would go on to surface in retellings of the journey of India’s information technology (IT) industry for decades to come. The crates contained parts for a private satellite dish that the firm’s executives would use not only to stay in touch with its headquarters in Dallas — which landlines could already do — but also transmit software code. Gate-kept Internet access was two years away.
Over 40 years on, the firm is often cited as perhaps the first Global Capability Centre (GCC) in India. A big reason behind it taking the trouble of setting up a sophisticated communication link with its head office and opening an offshore unit exists even today: the availability of a large and cheaper English-speaking IT workforce in India.
There are over 1,800 GCCs in India today. According to some industry estimates, at least one GCC is being established every week in the country. “The total revenue generated by GCCs in the last five years has grown from $40.4 billion in FY19 to $64.6 billion in FY24 with a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 9.8%,” Minister of State for Electronics and IT Jitin Prasada said in a written reply in Parliament in August 2025.
Shift in geopolitical reality
It has historically been cheaper for companies to hire Indians who immigrate to the U.S. than to set up local operations. Indians were welcomed, if not always with open arms, with the promise of a better life. This is no longer the geopolitical reality, with many immigration hotspots like the U.S. sharply limiting newcomers.
“We are seeing right now that mobility issues are very challenging,” says Sangeeta Gupta, senior vice-president at Nasscom, the main industry body for Indian and global IT firms. Even in the past, emigration opportunities were only available in “pockets”, but now those are also shrinking, she says.
“Today, if I am a mid-level or senior-level talent, [going abroad] may be on my agenda. But it is not the only agenda that I am looking at because if I’m not a high-end PhD in data science and AI [candidate], the opportunities for me are going to be very, very limited in different markets unlike in the past. So clearly, I think working in a GCC is a great opportunity,” she says.
Employees may be inclined to agree. Since they are not exactly freshers, foreign companies tend to pay them a competitive salary, even if the pay is not weighing down balance sheets as much as a western counterpart. As Gupta points out, GCCs “aren’t big campus hirers”, preferring to secure mid- or late-stage recruits who can “hit the ground running” and contribute to their parent organisations immediately.
Gayathri Subramonian, human resources executive at Staples, Inc., has a lot to appreciate about working at GCCs and the India arms of multinational companies. Generous leave policies, two-day weekends, and a “flat organisational structure” were all a departure from a domestic manufacturing conglomerate in Chennai where she started her career, she says.
“My husband studied in the U.S., worked there, and moved back,” Subramonian says. “Personally, I never wanted to go abroad. If you gave me an opportunity to go abroad, maybe I would for one or two years, but I would definitely want to come back here,” she says. This is because with the GCC boom, there are more opportunities here, she adds.
Staples is a household name in the U.S. for stationery and office supplies with no consumer-facing presence in India. The firm’s recently opened office in Chennai’s Perungudi, 100 strong and growing, forms an “innovation hub” that is “focused on building seamless technology solutions”, according to its website. The firm is not the only company that is unrecognisable to Indian firms but leveraging the country as a talent hub. Target, the big box U.S. retailer, has over 4,000 employees in its Bengaluru GCC. Rakuten, a Japanese e-commerce giant, has over 1,700 people in its 20-storey office in Domlur, Bengaluru.
A key turning point
While the opportunity to build a GCC was always ripe for the taking, it took more than shifting sentiments on immigration for global firms to pour serious money into the construct. A key turning point was the COVID-19 pandemic. “What we have seen post COVID is almost a very rapid acceleration of global companies” setting up shop in India, Ms. Gupta says. There has been a “hockey stick” growth in GCCs in India, she adds, with States eager to attract businesses.
This is a striking departure from the days of the entry of Texas Instruments. For that firm, the then Rajiv Gandhi government had to break “26 different rules”, according to Embedded Autonomy, a 1995 Stanford University Press book by Peter Evans on different countries’ digitisation baby steps. In spite of that political support, the firm set up its Indian unit only after two States turned it away, the book says, citing a Silicon Valley newsletter published by a network of Indian professionals. Now, Tamil Nadu, one of those States, has taxpayer-funded investor facilitation organisations like Guidance Tamil Nadu boasting about its “pro-business policies” for GCCs.
At one level, the terminology of GCCs is a branding coup. The term itself is several years old — it is not clear who coined it, its first use buried under a deluge of adopters and imitators over the late 2010s — but it has coincided with a vigorous accompaniment of any firm entering India to save on costs and leverage local talent.
“When we started the whole GCC journey in India, we used to have something called the Captive Forum,” Ms. Gupta says. “We used to say, ‘Oh, these are companies that are captive of their parent enterprise and that’s the only work they do’.” However, captivity, understandably, doesn’t make for a fulfilling sense of identity, or even decent branding, she says.
“These companies came back and said, ‘No, that’s a very narrow kind of word. It obviously is also not something that helps us attract talent and doesn’t really communicate the work we do.’ So we pivoted to the second phase, where we called them Global In-house Centres because we were trying to be very straight about these being in-house arms for global companies,” she adds.
“We shifted in 2018-19 to GCCs, because they said it is more than just about cost-effective talent; it is about deep capabilities that we are building out, whether it is finance and accounting capabilities on the business process outsourcing side, which is not just hiring people and doing the same process, but reimagining those processes; or it is the pure tech capability. And increasingly, it is a lot more about cybersecurity, AI, and those kinds of skills also that people are focusing on,” Ms. Gupta says.
Support to find footing in India
There is a whole industry now to help GCCs find their footing in India, from scouting office space — building it if necessary — to providing the kind of corporate consulting that is needed to get foreign firms to set up a fully functional office in India. ANSR Global, headquartered in Bengaluru, is the “biggest” firm in this space, says Smitha Hemmigae, the firm’s co-founder and managing director, in an interview from her office in the city.
Since firms opening a GCC aren’t exactly pinching pennies, Ms. Hemmigae says, there is little pressure to cut costs when setting up. “We have always set it up for value first,” she says. “Generally, if I go back and look at productivity, it is 25-30% better because you are hiring laterals who are qualified to do the job.”
This fact, which comes up in multiple conversations about GCCs, has its own implications. These firms are, in some sense, the natural successors to the IT industry in an age of increasing automation and a global climb up the enterprise services value chain ladder. However, as Ms. Hemmigae points out, “there is no bench”. In other words, everybody is hired for a certain role, with an expectation that their existing experience positions them well to succeed.
That also means that unlike in an IT set-up, this is not a phenomenon that could give poor but educated people a pathway into the middle class. But that doesn’t mean there are no upsides: GCCs can keep high-value people within the country, paying taxes within the country and being a part of the local economy directly.
For that well-positioned part of the job economy, white-collar professionals who can find their way in a global firm, this is making work here a more compelling prospect than it perhaps has been in the past. When the India operations of global firms were all back office jobs, Ms. Subramonian says, “it was just a supporting [role in] the business”. Now, she says, “we are also shaping the business in some form”. “So that contribution makes us feel like we are part of the core business… there’s a lot of action happening here.”
This does not mean, however, that Indians who can secure good opportunities to go abroad are leaving at a slower pace. Sanjaya Baru, journalist-turned-political adviser to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, wrote in Secession of the Successful last year that this trend is actually growing. Baru’s optimism about GCCs as a counterweight is tempered.
“While Indian reports on GCCs tend to focus on the number of jobs being created in India and the attractive remuneration being offered, there is little focus on the role that such GCCs play in sustaining the global dominance of U.S. firms,” Mr. Baru writes, arguing that while employees working in these firms do acquire skills that they can then entrepreneurially deploy in service of founding domestic champions, this “remains a pious hope”, an article of faith.
If the trend reverses and foreign firms cut back on GCC investments, the skills Indians have brought to the table may not immediately benefit Indian industry, he argues.
“Given the low level of investment [in research and development and other] competencies that global firms are hiring in GCCs, the question is moot when and whether local demand for such services would substitute for global demand if and when foreign firms choose to reduce their dependence on Indian GCCs,” he says.
“What if hiring by GCCs comes to a halt? [This may not] happen in the short- to medium-term, but what such questions draw one’s attention to is the fact that if local demand for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and high-tech skills does not rise, the growing supply of such skills will mean that Indian talent will continue to serve foreign firms.”
On the cusp of another rebranding
For now, at any rate, the business of setting up GCCs remains compelling. Alouk Kumar, founder of Inductus — another firm that has helped a handful of GCCs set up shop in the country — estimates that employees get paid an average of “1.2 lakh to 1.5 lakh” a month, a sum that would put most employees in the top 2% of the country.
“The current GCCs have an average of around 1,100 employees”, but this number will come down as smaller firms abroad also seek to open GCCs at a smaller per-unit scale. Kumar says small-and medium-sized businesses are averse to even having a local entity due to paperwork and “other headaches” that entail. Inductus and some other firms have started offering to hire and pay candidates on their behalf, technically becoming their employer, he says.
As GCCs evolve and adapt, they may also be on the cusp of another rebranding. After scrapping terms like captive centres and Global In-house Centres, Ms. Gupta says, “Now, people are saying, ‘No, GCC also is not a good enough word. We should be called global innovation hubs’.”
aroon.deep@thehindu.co.in
“Since firms opening a GCC aren’t exactly pinching pennies, there is little pressure to cut costs when setting up. If I look at productivity, it is 25-30% better because you are hiring laterals who are qualified to do the job”Smitha HemmigaeCo-founder and managing director, ANSR Global
Smitha Hemmigae, Co-founder and managing director, ANSR Global
“What we have seen post COVID-19 is almost a very rapid acceleration of global companies setting up shop in India. There has been a ‘hockey stick’ growth in GCCs in the country, with States eager to attract businesses”Sangeeta GuptaSenior vice-president, Nasscom
Sangeeta Gupta, Senior vice-president, Nasscom
“The current GCCs have an average of around 1,100 employees… they get paid an average of 1.2 lakh to 1.5 lakh a month, a sum that would put most employees in the top 2% of the country”Alouk KumarFounder, Inductus
Alouk Kumar, Founder, Inductus
