By Saurabh Mathur
Sustaining growth is a major challenge for policymakers, amid global economic uncertainty fuelled by geopolitics and rapid technological advancements. The difficulty rises further because growth must simultaneously create quality jobs, scale a future-ready skills base and improve India’s competitiveness. In this context, Global Capability Centres (GCCs) have emerged as one of the most significant, yet often understated, contributors to India’s economic momentum.
While GCCs have traditionally been seen as offshore service delivery units, today they are an integral part of the core operations of global enterprises. From technology support and digital engineering to finance, risk management and high-end R&D, GCCs are delivering fundamental impact for their parent organisations. This shift is visible in the Indian economy through long-term employment, higher productivity and innovation-led growth.
GCCs currently contribute approximately $68 billion in direct Gross Value Added (GVA), accounting for about 1.6–1.8 percent of India’s GDP. For a largely privately funded, knowledge-intensive sector, this represents a meaningful and growing macroeconomic contribution.
The recent CII report shows this contribution growing significantly, with GCCs’ direct contribution to India’s economy rising to $150–200 billion, driven by continued expansion and a shift towards higher-value, intellectual property-led work.
These contributions become even more impressive when we include indirect levers such as employment multipliers, consumption spill overs and ecosystem activity. The total economic impact of GCCs could potentially reach US$470–600 billion by 2030. Though optimistic, this estimate highlights the scale of economic opportunity GCCs could unlock.
High-quality and stable employment creation
India is home to over 1,800 GCCs, employing approximately 2.16 million professionals today. Employment with GCCs is largely formal, high-skilled and stable. This has important macroeconomic implications for both direct (income) and indirect (consumption) taxes. Stable jobs also improve households’ financial resilience, further bolstering consumption-led growth.
Beyond direct employment, GCCs generate significant indirect and induced employment across real estate, infrastructure, professional services, transport, retail, healthcare and education. When these multiplier effects are considered, GCC-led growth could support millions of additional jobs across the economy over the next decade.
Improving labour productivity through reskilling of the workforce
GCCs are making significant investments in building skills across areas such as digital transformation, analytics, finance, risk and AI. Their goal of delivering higher output per employee is aligned with India’s need to significantly boost labour productivity.
GCCs play a central role in advancing the country’s skilling and employability agenda. As global enterprises modernise technology stacks and operating models, GCCs function as large-scale, private-sector reskilling platforms.
Through internal academies, collaborations with academic institutions and exposure to global best practices, GCCs continuously upskill professionals in new-age skills such as cloud computing, data, AI, cybersecurity and digital operations.
This helps absorb talent from legacy roles, reduce skill mismatches in the labour market and mitigate the risk of structural unemployment arising from automation. These corporate skilling efforts also ease pressure on publicly funded skilling programmes.
Democratising growth for urban India
Metros and Tier-1 cities in India are under tremendous stress, with crumbling infrastructure and rapidly increasing cost of living. GCCs have recognised the opportunities that Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities offer. These emerging locations have large local talent pools that prefer to stay when quality roles are available, and they often offer better infrastructure.
State governments have recognised this potential and are investing in attracting GCCs through SOPs and infrastructure development. Leading states have already developed GCC-specific policy frameworks, a trend that will likely accelerate given the impact GCCs have on a state’s economy.
India’s GCC advantage
Once seen as back-office units, GCCs are now a powerful driver of India’s economic growth, creating high-quality jobs, boosting productivity, strengthening exports and positioning India as a global innovation hub with significant upside over the next decade.
Central and state governments have recognised their impact and potential. It would be interesting to see how policymakers further support this industry and enable it to drive further growth.
Saurabh Mathur is a Partner at Deloitte India
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.