GCCs are India's golden egg, the best thing happening in country today, but Delhi policy analysts don’t understand it

In the current economic dullness, there's a remarkably vibrant sector that Delhi policy wonks often miss, and misunderstand, because its best manifestations are in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune, and because our export categorisation masks it.

It’s global capability centres (GCCs), the tech and operations centres of MNCs, of which there are some 2,400 in India today employing over 3.5 million people. And every week, one or more is being established in India.Some months ago, a govt advisor told me GCCs are simply benefiting from India’s talent, and there’s little that India gets from them. More recently, a Delhi-based commentator on this page had the line: “India has the talent, it slaves away in global capability centres, constituting a brain drain at home.”Slaves! If GCC employees are slaving away, the rest of us must be in some unspeakable hell.GCC employees are the best compensated folks in India. GCC HR practices eclipse anything India Inc offers – Goldman Sachs’ 6-month-long paternity leave is an example. Work is just five days a week, of which two are typically from home. Their campuses are world-class – some CEOs of GCC parent companies have told us their India offices are better than their headquarters.

The workspaces are elevating and inspiring. Office designs are often stunning, from Cisco’s Antoni Gaudi-inspired floor to SAP’s courtyard spaces that have recreated the natural environments of Kerala, Goa and Rajasthan.

Almost all have best-in-class gyms, entertainment floors featuring numerous gaming options, multiple catering outlets each offering a different cuisine. In some, food is on the house – breakfast to dinner.

Google’s free cuisine rivals gourmet restaurants.Why such pampering? Companies around the world have to digitally transform, which requires hundreds, often thousands, of techies, and no other country offers the quantity and quality of techies India does. The likes of Infosys long ago created beautiful campuses to attract the young. When GCCs started coming in, they needed to offer more, since they were competing for the same talent.

They could also afford to, given their parent companies’ big budgets.

Some HR practices are headquarter legacies that are mandatorily extended to global operations.But increasingly, there’s another reason. The India offices are involved in the most cutting-edge work happening anywhere in their global operations, and innovation requires creating inspiring, collaborative spaces, and attracting the very best talent.

In Walmart, they have dramatically improved the cataloguing of its 1.2 billion products and have helped build an internal AI super-agent that has greatly simplified life for its developers.

In Lowe’s, they conceptualised and built what is today one of the fastest growing retail ad networks in the US.In Goldman Sachs, they led the work on a low-latency trading platform that hosts a suite of trading strategies to help clients achieve their trading objectives, perform historical analyses, and build quantitative models with real-time market information and trade execution.

In JPMorgan, they are a core part of building the payment infrastructure, as also the data work across all its businesses, including AI and advanced analytics work.For GE, 60-70% of the team that has designed its latest GE9X engine – which will go into Boeing’s latest generation aircraft, the 777X – sit in the India centre. When Ducati races in MotoGPs, it uses fuel developed using computationally-designed molecules at Shell’s centre in India.SAP’s CTO recently told us their India centre is helping the software giant rethink its entire technology stack, to make it AI-native, and noted that its first wave of AI agents were being developed in India. For Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Microsoft and Google, the India centres are absolutely central. And here's a stunner: a global luxury car maker told us if their global headquarters were to shut down today, their India centre can keep the operations going.We can go on and on. Such is the confidence in India, that many global leaders now sit out of GCCs, scores of new GCCs are being established every year, and newer entrants, like Chevron and hedge fund Millennium, are pulling out all the stops. When Chevron launched its GCC 15 months ago, it represented the 147-year-old company’s largest investment by far in technology capacity and capability building outside North America.

The investment has gone into a spectacular office setup with large 3D digital-twin screening rooms that employees can walk into to understand exactly how an oil rig in the middle of an ocean looks, feels and works.What China’s in mfg, India’s in servicesWhat China did for the world in manufacturing, India’s doing for the world in digital transformation, a market estimated between $1 trillion and $2.6 trillion, and growing at a CAGR of over 20%.

The impact is already humongous. For years, GCC revenue estimates focused on the higher-end part of their tech work we just described. But GCCs also do IT, and a myriad of business processes, thanks to India’s three decades of experience doing business process outsourcing work.

Many MNCs centralise in these GCCs their finance, HR, legal, procurement, supply chain management, marketing, and customer service. In finance, they today handle high-value operations like trade settlements, risk management, regulatory reporting, treasury management, and financial planning & analysis.Two years ago, consultancy Wizmatic painstakingly put together a more comprehensive estimate of GCC exports using data from the Registrar of Companies. And came up with an export figure of $150 billion for 2024-25 – about 4.5% of India’s GDP. The export growth rate for the previous five years ranged between an astounding 11% and 24%. It resolved several paradoxes. When growth of companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro has slumped, how is India’s services exports growing so dramatically as to equal merchandise exports today – from 59% of merchandise exports in 2021-22 to 96% in 2025-26? Or why are Economic Surveys of states like Karnataka reporting double-digit software & services exports?GCCs have become the engine of growth of India’s tech sector, and India’s exports.

And of India too – if we also consider they account for over 40% of grade A office space leasing in India, and they are drivers of consumption, given the high levels of compensation of the 4 million employees.Use policy to catalyse the ecosystemAll of this has happened without the govt doing much – barring the historical legacy of building top-class engineering institutions. The lesson for Delhi policymakers is, this is a phenomenal opportunity to build a policy around GCCs, focusing on attracting more, and using them to transform other core areas – like China did with foreign direct investment.

Given that their parent companies are the world’s biggest R&D spenders, GCCs can help with curricula and research in Indian academic institutions – and they are not doing enough.

At a TOI event, an Indian Institute of Science (IISc) professor berated a GCC leader for not partnering with it. GCCs need to build robust startup incubation programmes – some have, but it’s tiny compared to what’s possible. GCCs need to be encouraged to move into smaller towns. GCC employees need to be incentivised to establish startups – remember, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, founders of one of India’s most celebrated ventures, Flipkart, came out of a GCC (Amazon), as have many of today’s deeptech startup founders.We need a carrot and stick policy. Yes, sticks too. Because GCCs need India, as much as India needs them.