India's GCC landscape in numbers

Why the count varies

Before the numbers, a caution that makes the rest of them usable.

Published counts of India's Global Capability Centres disagree, and they disagree for a legitimate reason: there is no single definition in use. Some counts measure parent companies with a presence in India; some measure delivery units, of which a single parent may operate several; some include mid-market captives that other counts exclude; some count registered entities and others count operational sites.

The practical effect is a spread. Through 2024 and 2025, reputable sources placed the figure anywhere between roughly 1,700 and over 2,000. nasscom's 2025 reporting described over 1,700 GCCs and nearly 3,000 units across the country, which reconciles most of the apparent disagreement in one sentence.

Treat the range as the answer. Anyone quoting a single precise number without stating their inclusion criteria is not being careful.

The core figures

Number of centres. Approximately 1,700–1,800 through 2024–25 on most counts, with some placing it above 2,000 depending on criteria. Growth from roughly 1,430 in FY19 to over 1,700 by FY24.

Employment. Approximately 1.9 million professionals. nasscom's 2025 reporting noted that nearly half of Indian GCCs now manage end-to-end product lifecycles rather than executing to specification — the single most important structural change in the sector.

Revenue. Estimated at around $64.6 billion in 2024, with projections exceeding $100 billion by 2030.

Economic weight. Direct gross value added reported at roughly $68 billion in 2025, up from about $10 billion in 2010 — around 2% of India's GDP and 4% of services sector GDP, with projections of $128 billion in direct GVA by 2030.

Global share. Property consultancy Vestian reported India hosting roughly 1,700 of approximately 3,200 GCCs worldwide, around 53% of the global total.

Growth trajectory. Projections converge on 2,100–2,400 centres by 2030, at roughly 150 new centres annually and a CAGR of around 8% through FY28. Roughly 50 new centres launched in the first half of CY2025 alone.

Where they are, and why that is changing

Concentration is extreme and beginning to loosen.

Between 94% and 95% of India's GCCs sit in six or seven tier-1 cities: Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Pune. That concentration produces the real estate figure that explains why the tier-2 conversation is happening at all — GCCs accounted for approximately 38% of office leasing across India's top seven cities in 2025, taking 31.3 million square feet, the highest volume recorded, and are expected to account for around 40% of Grade-A office demand in 2025-26.

When a single category of tenant takes nearly two-fifths of premium office supply in the same handful of cities, cost pressure and talent competition follow directly.

The policy response has been visible. Union Budget 2025-26 proposed a national framework for GCC expansion beyond the metros, with Jaipur, Bhubaneswar, Indore, Coimbatore and Visakhapatnam among the cities under active consideration.

The mid-market shift

This is the figure most likely to change a reader's assumptions.

The Zinnov–nasscom Mid-market GCC Report 2025 identified more than 480 mid-market centres employing over 210,000 professionals — approximately 27% of India's GCC landscape.

A capability centre in India is no longer a Fortune 500 instrument. Roughly a quarter of the landscape is mid-market, and the headcount at which a focused centre becomes viable is meaningfully lower than the figure most first-time buyers assume.

The counterweight is worth stating alongside it: about 5% of India's GCCs are "mega" centres, and they employ close to half the total workforce. Scale is consolidating at the top while the base broadens at the bottom. A mid-market centre competes for the same senior engineers as a mega-GCC in the same city, which is a hiring reality that belongs in a capacity model rather than in a footnote.

Sector composition

IT and IT-enabled services lead at approximately 49% of centres. Banking, financial services and insurance follow at approximately 17%. Healthcare, engineering, consulting, telecom and media together account for a further 19% or so.

More than 65% of India's GCCs serve companies headquartered in the United States — which is the context for the sharp attention the sector received after the September 2025 H-1B fee change reset the cost comparison between onshore hiring and offshore capability.

What the numbers do not tell you

The aggregate figures are useful for board approval and useless for planning.

They do not tell you how long entity formation takes in your chosen state, which is frequently the critical path rather than hiring. They do not tell you what a senior engineer in your specific discipline costs in your chosen city, or what attrition looks like in that role. They do not tell you whether your work is capability work that justifies a centre or capacity work that a vendor should hold. And they do not tell you what happens at transfer, which is where Build-Operate-Transfer arrangements most often go wrong.

Use them to establish that the market is mature, deep and still growing. Then cost your own case on your own workload, because a per-seat model built from national averages will not survive its first year.

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# Sources for this batch

• Gartner press release, "Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027", 25 June 2025 — gartner.com
• MIT Project NANDA, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, July 2025
• Klarna Q1 2024 results materials (2.3m chats, ~700 agent equivalents, ~$40m annualised); Bloomberg interview with Sebastian Siemiatkowski, May 2025; Forbes coverage, 18 May 2025
• Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Official Journal, 12 July 2024
• Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, adopted 8 July 2026, in force 27 July 2026
• European Commission AI Act Service Desk implementation timeline — ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu
• Zinnov–nasscom Mid-market GCC Report 2025
• nasscom community GCC publications, 2025
• Vestian via IBEF, July 2025
• JLL India GCC office guide
• D&B, Economic Impact of Global Capability Centers in India

# Publishing notes for this batch

• D1 and E2 carry visible "last reviewed" dates. This is an exception to the section's undated convention and is necessary: a regulatory timeline or a statistics reference without a review date is unusable to a professional reader.
• D1's timeline must be re-verified against the Commission source immediately before publication. It has been amended once already.
• A6 names a real company and quotes its CEO's publicly reported statements. Keep the characterisation factual and avoid any implication of judgement about Klarna as an organisation — the piece is stronger for treating it as an honest correction rather than a failure, and safer besides.
• B1's arithmetic is the most linkable asset in the batch. Consider a small inline table showing document-level accuracy at 95%, 98% and 99.5% across 6, 12 and 20 fields.
• Each piece links to exactly one service page. Do not add more.