Setting Up a Global Capability Centre (GCC) in India
The Bhagavad Gita opens with Arjuna frozen on a battlefield, overwhelmed by choice. Most global leaders I speak with about India arrive in a similar state - not because the case for a GCC is weak, but because the noise around it is loud. Market size reports, city rankings, cost calculators, four different "setup routes." Everyone is certain. Few agree.
So let me offer what Krishna offered Arjuna first: clarity before action.
The scale is no longer debatable. India now runs somewhere north of 1,750 Global Capability Centres, employing close to two million professionals and contributing tens of billions of dollars in services exports. Karnataka alone accounts for over a quarter of that ecosystem. This isn't a trend anymore. It's infrastructure - the way roads and power grids are infrastructure. You don't ask whether to use them. You ask how well you'll use them.
What has genuinely changed is intent. For two decades, a GCC in India meant back-office cost arbitrage - invoices processed, tickets closed, headquarters thinking. That model is dying. The centres opening in 2026 own product roadmaps, run AI research that feeds the parent company's core strategy, and increasingly promote from within rather than import talent from outside. The Gita has a phrase for this shift: from karma done for the fruit of the action, to karma done because the work itself is the purpose. India's GCCs have stopped doing tasks assigned to them. They've started owning outcomes.
The economics still matter - they've just become the secondary argument. A fifty-person team costs roughly a third to run in India compared to an equivalent US build. But if cost were the whole story, this would be a procurement decision, not a strategic one. The real question a founder should ask isn't "how much do I save" - it's "how much capability do I build that I couldn't build anywhere else, at this depth, at this speed."
On where to build: the geography is not uniform and treating it as one homogenous "India" is the single most common founder mistake I see. Bengaluru remains the default for AI, cloud, and deep-tech - dense, competitive, expensive, and worth every rupee of the premium if that's your function. Hyderabad has quietly become the country's analytics and life-sciences engine, with meaningfully lower attrition and cost. Pune and Chennai hold their own in automotive and engineering R&D. And a second tier - Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Indore, Jaipur - is emerging as the smart spoke to a metro hub, offering real savings and real loyalty at the cost of a shallower senior bench.
On how to enter: this is where most guidance gets it backwards. The old sequence was incorporate, then hire - a four-to-eight month runway before your first employee sits at a desk. The sequence that's actually working in 2026 runs the other way: hire first under an Employer of Record, prove the operating model with real people doing real work, and incorporate your own entity once scale justifies the fixed cost - typically somewhere between fifty and seventy-five employees. Kautilya understood this centuries ago in the Arthashastra: test the terrain before you commit the treasury. You don't build the fort before you know the war is worth fighting.
The compliance layer has, for once, gotten simpler rather than more complex. India consolidated twenty-nine fragmented labour laws into four codes in late 2025. For a foreign employer, that is fewer moving parts to track, not more - provided your India partner already runs clean, code-compliant structures.
Here is what I tell every founder who asks me whether now is the right time: the Gita's counsel to Arjuna was never "wait until certainty arrives." It was act, with full commitment, and let go of attachment to the specific outcome you've pictured. Your first ten hires in India will not look exactly like your business case predicted. Build anyway. The centres that will matter in 2030 are the ones whose founders stopped calculating the perfect entry and started operating.
India isn't asking to be evaluated anymore. It's asking to be built with.
Planning your India expansion? Don't navigate it alone.
Contact OpsMaven today and take the first step toward building your India operations with confidence.
— from the desk of Sunitha Gedupudi, CEO OpsMaven, where we help founders turn the India decision into an India operation.
