Global Capability Centres – Global companies running their engineering and R&D centres from India.
- 1,800+ active GCCs in India (close to 2m professionals)
- $70bn ecosystem revenue (crossed in early 2026)
- 2.3m STEM graduates a year (the underlying pipeline)
- 200–400bps GCC salary premium (over Indian IT services, annually)
A Rolls-Royce engineer in Bengaluru builds jet-engine digital twins. A bank’s India campus down the road builds trading infrastructure. If your model of an Indian office is a call centre, it is twenty years old.
India hosts more than 1,800 active Global Capability Centres employing close to two million people, with revenues past $70bn. Nasscom projects 2.8 million people and $105bn a year by 2030.
The functional shift matters more than the headcount. Early centres moved repeatable back-office work offshore; today’s are where hard engineering happens. Ninety percent of the activity still sits in six cities.
The signal to watch: Where the next hundred centres land. Outside the top six cities means the wage spiral is solved.
Where we would take your group
- A GCC engineering floor. Which products are owned in India end to end.
- A campus talent lead. The salary premium, and why the engineers stay.
- A tier-two city centre. Where the next hundred centres are landing.
Questions for the debrief
- GCC salaries are rising 200–400 basis points faster than the IT services sector around them. What does that tell you about which labour market is actually scarce?
- Ninety percent of activity sits in six cities. Is that concentration a strength (specialisation) or a risk (wage and attrition spirals)?
- If India is now where the hard engineering happens, what work is left at headquarters? And is that a stable arrangement?
