Why Global Companies are investing more in India's GCCs
Sanjay Kataria, Vice President and Managing Director, India and Rest of Asia (non-China), Inteva Products in an interaction with India Manufacturing Review shared his views on what is driving Multinationals to build deeper engineering footprints in India, how GCCs in India are transforming from Support Functions into Global Innovation Engines, what Competitive advantages are making India the Top Choice for new GCC Investments and more.
Sanjay Kataria is Inteva’s Vice President and Managing Director for India and Rest of Asia (non-China), where he spearheads business growth, operational excellence, and profitability across these dynamic markets. Prior to joining Inteva in 2012, Sanjay held several leadership roles at Delphi. Sanjay holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee; a Master of Science in Multidisciplinary Engineering from Purdue University; and an MBA from the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business.
Why are Global Companies betting bigger on India for Engineering and Operations Growth?
Global companies are no longer building India operations because it is the path of least resistance; they are building them because India increasingly offers genuine engineering depth at the best cost and time-zone advantage that very few geographies can match simultaneously. For a sector like automotive and industrial manufacturing, this matters enormously. Vehicle architectures are becoming software-defined, electrified, and increasingly compliance-heavy across geographies, and the engineering bandwidth required to support a global product portfolio has grown far faster than headcount budgets at most headquarters. India’s combination of a large STEM graduate base, decades of design and simulation experience built up through earlier waves of IT and engineering R&D, and a maturing supplier ecosystem makes it one of the few places where a company can scale engineering and operations together rather than sequentially.
There is also a structural shift in how leadership teams think about risk. After several years of global supply chain disruption, companies want engineering and decision-making capacity closer to where products are built and sold, not concentrated entirely at a distant headquarters. India offers that proximity advantage for a large and growing domestic manufacturing base, while still serving global programs. Add to this continuing policy support - production-linked incentives, improving ease-of-doing-business rankings, and significant infrastructure investment in industrial corridors - and you have an environment where engineering, operations, and increasingly innovation can all be anchored in one location rather than spread thin across multiple smaller centers worldwide.
Can India Become the World’s Most Important Hub for Global Capability Centers?
India already anchors the global GCC industry by scale - current industry estimates put the number of GCCs in the country at over two thousand, generating close to a hundred billion dollars in annual value and employing more than two million professionals. In terms of sheer volume, India is already on the advanced path to establish itself as the most important hub. The more interesting question is whether it can be the most important hub by mandate and influence, not just headcount, and the honest answer is - not yet, but moving fast. Becoming a true transformation hub and value creation centers is something which GCCs are striving to be.
Most GCCs in India still carry a meaningful share of execution and delivery work. The shift toward owning full product lines, P&L responsibility, architecture decisions, and global innovation mandates is real and accelerating, but it is uneven across sectors and company maturity levels. The centers that have made this leap tend to share a few traits: long tenure in India, leadership teams with genuine decision rights rather than reporting lines back to headquarters for every call, and deep integration with business outcomes rather than cost metrics alone.
For India to consolidate its position as the world’s most important GCC hub in the fullest sense, three things need to keep improving in parallel: depth of mid and senior leadership pipelines capable of running global functions end-to-end, continued investment in non-metro cities to widen the talent base, and a policy environment that treats GCCs as strategic economic infrastructure rather than a real estate or services category. The trajectory is encouraging. The destination is not guaranteed, but it is well within reach.
Underpinning all of this, however, is a dimension that does not always make it into strategic roadmaps but is arguably the most decisive: cultural evolution. The next phase of GCC maturity will require a genuine shift in mindset - one that builds a strong ethics and value system, a deep willingness to learn and adapt, and an execution discipline that earns and sustains trust over time. These are also what drive stability of talent, which remains one of the most cited concerns among global leadership teams. Equally important is developing true ownership and decision-making capability at the India end, rather than a culture of seeking approval for every significant call. The honest reality is that cultural integration with global counterparts remains a work in progress. Bridging that gap - in communication styles, risk appetite, and accountability norms - is as important as any policy or infrastructure investment in determining whether India's GCCs fulfil their full potential.
What is driving Multinationals to build deeper engineering footprints in India?
Three forces are converging, and it is the combination, not any single one, that explains the depth of recent investment. The first is talent economics that have evolved well beyond simple cost arbitrage. India produces one of the largest pools of engineering graduates in the world every year, and a meaningful share of them now come with exposure to advanced manufacturing, embedded systems, and software-hardware integration skills that global product development genuinely needs, not just headcount to absorb routine tasks.
The second is ecosystem maturity. Two decades of IT services, R&D centers, and increasingly manufacturing investment have built a dense supplier, academic, and talent network around cities like Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Delhi, NCR region, and Hyderabad. A multinational setting up an engineering center today is not starting from zero; it is plugging into an existing ecosystem of component suppliers, testing facilities, and experienced engineering managers who have already worked on global programs.
The third, and increasingly decisive factor for sectors like automotive, is the growing alignment between where products are engineered and where they are manufactured and sold. India’s domestic market and manufacturing base have both expanded substantially, and companies are recognizing that co-locating engineering with operations shortens development cycles and improves responsiveness to local regulatory and customer requirements. When deep talent, an established ecosystem, and the pull of a genuinely large domestic market come together, the case for deeper engineering footprints becomes less about cost savings and more about competitive necessity.
How are GCCs in India transforming from Support Functions into Global Innovation Engines?
The transformation follows a fairly recognizable maturity curve, even if the pace differs by company. Centers typically start with transactional support work across business functions - IT helpdesks, finance and accounting processing, basic engineering documentation - where the value proposition is cost and scale. Over time, as the India team builds domain credibility, the mandate shifts toward centers of excellence: specialized functions where India becomes the global expert for a particular technology, process, or product line rather than just an execution arm.
The real transformation happens at the next stage, when India centers move from supporting decisions made elsewhere to actually making them. This shows up in concrete ways: engineering teams that own full module or system design rather than detailed engineering handed down from headquarters, India-based leaders who sit on global product or technology councils and centers that file patents and drive intellectual property rather than only executing specifications. In automotive engineering specifically, this looks like India teams owning complete sub-systems end-to-end - from concept through validation - for global vehicle platforms, not just providing design support for work finalized abroad.
What enables this shift is less about any single initiative and more about trust earned over time, supported by deliberate investment in senior technical leadership, rotational assignments that expose India talent to global business context, and headquarters’ willingness to genuinely decentralize decision rights rather than just decentralize tasks. The centers furthest along this curve today are the ones where global leadership made that trust-building investment early and consistently.
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Sustaining that momentum, however, requires more than trust - it requires shared goals. Headquarters and GCCs need a jointly owned, long-term innovation strategy rather than mandates handed down from one side and executed on the other. When both parties have skin in the outcome, the ambition tends to be larger and the commitment more durable. Critically, further progress will also depend on what happens after the mandate is given: once resources have been rationalized or infrastructure optimized elsewhere on the assumption that India owns a function, the India team must deliver. The confidence to devolve significant responsibility and the demonstrated ability to carry it - on both sides - is what ultimately separates centers that become genuine innovation engines from those that plateau at a more advanced form of support.
Will AI and Digital Engineering redefine the Next Phase of GCC Expansion in India?
Yes, and it is already happening faster than most five-year plans anticipated. India has become one of the largest AI hiring markets globally, and GCCs are at the center of that shift because they combine two things - AI-led engineering needs: deep domain knowledge of the product or process being digitized and large-scale software talent to build and deploy the models. For engineering-heavy sectors like automotive, this is showing up in digital twins for vehicle and component validation, AI-assisted design optimization that compresses development cycles, and predictive analytics embedded directly into manufacturing operations rather than treated as a separate technology layer.
What is genuinely new in this phase is that AI is changing how GCCs scale, not just what they work on. The traditional GCC growth model was largely headcount-driven: more output required more people. AI-augmented engineering teams can take on more complex, higher-value work with flatter headcount growth, which changes the economics and the talent strategy simultaneously. Companies are now hiring fewer, more senior engineers who can work alongside AI tools, rather than large pyramids of junior resources.
This does raise a real question about the next generation of talent pipelines, since the traditional entry-level roles that built engineering careers are themselves being automated. The GCCs that get this right will be the ones that redesign career pathways around augmented engineering roles rather than simply shrinking junior hiring. Digital engineering is not just redefining capability; it is redefining what an engineering career in India looks like over the next decade.
That said, the jury is still out on exactly how AI will reshape the nature of work inside GCCs. The critical question is whether AI primarily serves as a productivity tool - making existing teams dramatically more efficient and capable - or whether it progressively substitutes for human roles. History offers a useful reference point: when spreadsheet software arrived, the prevailing concern was that it would reduce the need for accountants. What actually happened was the opposite - it freed accountants from manual calculation and created an explosion of higher-value analytical work, growing the profession rather than shrinking it. AI may well follow a similar trajectory, enabling GCC professionals to operate at a level of insight and output that was previously unreachable. But this is not guaranteed, and the outcome will depend significantly on how companies make the transition. For GCCs specifically, the imperative is to stay tightly aligned with the parent company's overall AI and automation strategy, so that the value proposition of the India center is continuously updated rather than inadvertently eroded. GCCs that define their role in an AI-enabled enterprise proactively - rather than waiting for that role to be redefined for them - will be the ones that expand their mandate through this transition rather than defend it.
What Competitive advantages are making India the Top Choice for new GCC Investments?
A few advantages stand out clearly when you look at where new GCC investment is actually landing. The first and most obvious is talent depth and diversity - not just volume of graduates, but the breadth of disciplines available in one country, spanning software, mechanical and electrical engineering, data science, finance, and design, often within the same metro region. Very few countries can offer that combination at scale and quality.
The second is time-zone positioning. India sits in a workable overlap window with both Europe and the United States within a single working day and increasingly serves APAC time zones from the same talent base, which makes it genuinely useful for global, always-on operating models rather than a single regional market.
The third advantage, often underweighted in comparisons, is operating maturity. After two decades of GCC and outsourcing experience, India has a deep bench of mid and senior managers who have actually run global delivery models before - people who understand how to structure governance, manage stakeholders across time zones, and scale teams without losing quality. That managerial maturity is hard to replicate quickly in newer GCC geographies.
Finally, policy and infrastructure have caught up meaningfully. State governments are actively competing for GCC investment with dedicated policies, Grade A commercial real estate supply has expanded well beyond the traditional metros, and connectivity and power infrastructure in industrial corridors has improved enough to support manufacturing-linked engineering centers, not just office-based ones. Put together, talent breadth, time-zone reach, operating maturity, and improving infrastructure form a difficult combination for competing geographies to match in totality.
How can companies scale their India Operations while balancing talent, costs, and innovation?
Scaling well requires treating talent, cost, and innovation as a single integrated decision rather than three separate levers pulled by different teams. The most common mistake I see is companies optimizing cost in isolation - chasing the cheapest location or the largest available graduate pool - and only later discovering that retention, quality, or innovation capacity has suffered as a result.
A more durable approach starts with talent strategy. Companies that scale successfully tend to diversify beyond the traditional metro cities early, building presence in emerging hubs where competition for talent is lower and loyalty tends to be higher, while keeping a smaller senior leadership core in established centers. This reduces wage inflation pressure without sacrificing access to experienced talent for the roles that need it most.
On cost, the discipline that matters is being honest about what kind of value the India center is meant to deliver. If the mandate is genuinely execution and scale, cost efficiency should be the primary metric and should be protected. If the mandate has shifted toward innovation and ownership, leadership needs to resist measuring the center purely on cost-per-output, because that metric actively discourages the kind of work that justifies a higher-value mandate in the first place.
On innovation, the practical lever is decision rights. Centers that are allowed to make real product, process, or technology decisions - not just execute decisions made elsewhere - develop innovation capacity organically, because engineers closest to the problem are the ones generating the ideas. Scaling sustainably is less about finding a perfect balance point and more about being deliberate about which lever matters most for a given function, and resourcing accordingly.
What will the future of Global Capability Centers in India look like by 2030?
By 2030, I expect the language itself to shift - fewer companies will talk about ‘GCCs’ as a distinct category and more will simply call these their global engineering, technology, or operations headquarters, with India as one of several equal nodes rather than a satellite. Industry projections already point to the market roughly doubling from current levels, crossing somewhere close to a hundred billion dollars in value and employing well over two and a half million professionals, but the more meaningful change will be in mandate, not headcount.
I expect three structural shifts to be visible by then. First, geographic spread will widen meaningfully beyond the current handful of metro cities, as talent costs and real estate pressure in established hubs push companies toward tier-two cities that have been quietly building engineering and technical education infrastructure. Second, sector specialization will deepen - certain cities and even certain campuses will become globally recognized centers for specific domains, whether that is automotive electrification, semiconductor design, or AI infrastructure, rather than generic technology hubs serving any client. Third, and most importantly for how these centers are run, I expect a meaningfully higher share of India-based leaders holding genuinely global roles, not India-specific titles with global-sounding mandates.
The risk to this trajectory is complacency around talent pipelines and infrastructure in the cities expected to absorb the next wave of growth. If that investment keeps pace, India’s GCC ecosystem by 2030 will look less like an offshore extension of global business and more like one of its primary engines.
