Which Indian city is best for setting up a Global Capability Centre (GCC)?

City choice for a GCC comes down to matching the location's talent specialization to the functions you plan to build. Bengaluru remains the deepest pool for software engineering, product, and data science talent, but carries the highest commercial real estate and compensation costs among Indian cities. Hyderabad offers comparable tech talent depth at a meaningfully lower cost base and has become the default alternative for large-scale GCC expansions.

Pune and Chennai suit GCCs with an engineering, R&D, or manufacturing-adjacent mandate, with strong automotive and industrial-sector talent pipelines. Gurugram and the broader NCR region work well for finance, accounting, and shared-services GCCs given proximity to corporate headquarters functions and a large finance/analytics talent base. Beyond talent fit, factors like existing GCC cluster density (which affects attrition and salary benchmarking), state-level incentives, and connectivity to your home headquarters should all factor into the final decision — there usually isn't a wrong answer among the top four or five cities, only a better or worse fit for your specific function mix.