The strategic evolution of GCCs in India
For many years, India’s Global Capability Centres (GCC) were described in predictable terms: Efficient, process-driven, and cost-advantaged. They handled essential operations with quiet precision and were rarely seen as central to strategic decision-making. That description now feels outdated. GCCs in India are undergoing a structural repositioning—from being engines of efficiency to becoming custodians of capability. In the process, they are reshaping not only global operating models but also the legal and regulatory architecture within which multinational companies function.
This shift has been prompted by a mix of global pressures and domestic strengths. The traditional offshoring logic—labour arbitrage and scale—has softened as wages rise and automation absorbs routine activity. At the same time, corporations face an unprecedented regulatory burden: data-protection obligations, Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance, sector-specific compliance requirements, cybersecurity liabilities, ESG disclosures, and heightened board-level accountability. As the legal environment around global business tightens, corporations require locations that offer capability, institutional maturity, and regulatory clarity. India increasingly meets all three.
India’s strongest differentiator today is the quality of its talent. Few jurisdictions offer such a dense concentration of professionals who can simultaneously understand cloud architecture, AI systems, regulatory technology, internal controls, risk modelling, and global compliance frameworks. This deep talent pool has expanded the scope of GCC mandates: Engineering teams in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune and rapidly growing tier-II cities now run enterprise data platforms, global cybersecurity centres, sanctions screening engines, AI validation pipelines, and digital product development. These are not auxiliary functions; they are legally consequential activities central to a corporation’s fiduciary and regulatory responsibilities.
As a lawyer observing this evolution, what stands out is how the legal spine of GCCs has thickened. With India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act) now in force, the establishment of data-heavy operations here demands rigorous compliance frameworks, formalised data-transfer protocols, and clear documentation of fiduciary obligations between Indian entities and their global affiliates. Multinational companies are therefore embedding privacy engineers, DPDP compliance officers, and digital-governance teams within their GCCs—roles that did not meaningfully exist a decade ago.
On the international side, India-based GCCs increasingly support compliance with the EU’s GDPR, the EU AI Act, US cybersecurity disclosure norms, and sectoral requirements in banking, insurance, med-tech, payments, and energy. Many of these external obligations impose vicarious liability on global management for failures in internal controls. It is therefore unsurprising that boards now rely on India-based teams to build defensible audit trails, risk registers, mitigation frameworks, and internal certifications. In several corporations, the Indian GCC effectively functions as an internal “second line of defence”.
This legalisation of capability also affects how GCCs are structured. In areas involving IP creation, AI model development, or product ownership, questions of intellectual property assignment, intra-group licensing, and transfer pricing require careful structuring. Indian tax authorities have become increasingly attentive to the characterisation of inter-company arrangements. GCCs that develop proprietary algorithms, user-experience assets or domain-specific tools must ensure that contractual documentation—master service agreements, R&D accords, and IP-assignment deeds—reflects economic substance. In high-value GCCs, legal structuring has quietly become as important as engineering talent.
Labour and employment considerations are also evolving. As more GCCs operate night shifts, hybrid work interfaces, and women-led teams in sensitive functions, compliance with state Shops and Establishments laws, workplace-safety mandates, and employee-consent requirements becomes critical. Several states have modernised their frameworks to attract high-skill employment, and companies now actively consider legal predictability when selecting Tier-II expansion geographies. Stability, not cost, has become the operative word.
Another powerful driver of capability concentration is India’s digital public infrastructure. No other jurisdiction combines interoperable identity systems, population-scale payments rails, open digital commerce frameworks, and regulated data-sharing networks. GCCs use this environment to test authentication tools, stress-test AI models, benchmark fraud detection systems, and build privacy-by-design architectures. The DPI ecosystem gives India an unusual advantage: companies can design solutions that satisfy both engineering benchmarks and statutory compliance in a single location.
The cumulative effect of these shifts is a change in how global headquarters view India. The question is no longer whether India is an attractive location—it is which global capabilities should be anchored here. With geopolitical uncertainty rising, and with regulatory penalties for compliance failures increasing worldwide, companies seek centres that combine skill depth with legal resilience. India’s GCCs are emerging as precisely that combination: Skilled, stable, and aligned with maturing regulatory frameworks.
This transformation is not a passing phase. It reflects a deeper restructuring of corporate capability in a world where technology, law, and governance are no longer distinct domains. As digital infrastructure becomes the backbone of business, legal and regulatory rigour becomes inseparable from engineering excellence. India, with its talent density and its evolving legal architecture, is becoming a natural destination for the fusion of these capabilities.
If the early decades of GCCs were powered by operational efficiency, the next phase will be shaped by legal robustness, domain expertise, and strategic accountability. India’s centres increasingly serve as builders of institutional memory, architects of risk frameworks, and guardians of compliance credibility. Their rise marks a broader shift in the global economy: Capability—not arbitrage—is now the true currency of competitiveness.
And increasingly, that capability is being built in India.