GCC Location Decision: Bangalore vs Hyderabad vs Pune, What Actually Matters
Beyond the obvious talent pool comparisons, attrition rates, specific functional talent depth, and real estate cost trajectory differ meaningfully enough between India's top GCC hubs to change the total cost picture.
Bangalore remains India's largest and deepest tech talent pool, particularly for software engineering and data science, but it also carries the highest talent competition, and correspondingly higher attrition rates and salary inflation, of any Indian GCC hub. Hyderabad has built genuinely deep specialization in specific sectors (life sciences, certain enterprise software categories) with somewhat lower talent-cost competition than Bangalore for comparable roles. Pune offers strong engineering talent with a meaningfully lower cost base than either, though the absolute talent pool size for highly specialized niche skills is smaller.
Attrition rate differences between these cities are a real, often underweighted cost factor, higher attrition in the most competitive hubs means higher recruiting and onboarding cost embedded in the ongoing operating budget, not just the headline salary comparison.
The right location decision should weigh the GCC's specific functional needs against each city's actual talent depth in that function, not a generic city ranking, a location that's optimal for a data engineering GCC may not be optimal for a finance shared-services GCC, even within the same shortlist of cities.