With over 220 GCCs, 14 'Emerging Cities' grow at nearly 11% CAGR, job openings record 42% growth

Hyderabad: At least 14 tier II cities have been identified as 'emerging cities' for hosting Global Capability Centres (GCCs), signalling a decisive geographic shift in one of India's most dynamic economic segments.

India is currently home to more than 1,900 GCCs employing over 2.1 million professionals, a sector that now contributes more than 1.5 per cent of the country's GDP.

Yet the vast majority of this activity has remained concentrated in six tier I cities- Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai, and the NCR. That is beginning to change.

According to the Emerging Cities: India's Next Frontier for GCC Expansion Report 2026 by ANSR, released on Tuesday emerging cities already host over 220 GCC units, are growing at nearly 11 per cent CAGR, and have recorded 42 per cent growth in GCC job openings more than double the 19 per cent recorded in established metro hubs. The geographic centre of gravity of India's GCC landscape, the report concludes, is decisively shifting.

"Emerging cities are no longer alternatives to tier I metros they are strategic complements within a more resilient and diversified operating model," said Smitha Hemmigae, Managing Director, ANSR.

"The next chapter of India's GCC story will not be defined by concentration, but by distribution — by the ability of enterprises to build agile, capability-led networks across a wider geographic canvas. The enterprises that recognise this early, and act with conviction, will define the next decade," she said.

The report evaluated 14 emerging GCC locations - GIFT City, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Indore, Jaipur, Kochi, Lucknow, Mangaluru, Mysuru, Thiruvananthapuram, Navi Mumbai, Visakhapatnam, Bhopal, and Warangal across four strategic pillars like talent attractiveness, infrastructure readiness, business and regulatory environment, and quality of life. Each city was assessed for its ability to support high-value, future-focused GCC mandates, not merely as a cost-reduction play.

The findings pointed to a structural inflection point driven by six converging forces. Chief among them is a talent geography rebalancing, reflected in the 42 per cent surge in GCC job openings in emerging cities compared to 19 per cent in metro hubs. Infrastructure gaps are closing rapidly through increased budget allocations, SEZ expansions, metro rail buildouts, and airport modernisation.

The policy environment has also been transformed by the Union Budget 2025's national guidance framework the first coordinated, government-backed push to develop GCC-ready ecosystems beyond India's major metros. Cutting across all of these is the impact of artificial intelligence, which is steadily narrowing the capability divide between tier I and tier II locations and opening new possibilities for building distributed, high-impact delivery networks.

The report also identified five strategic imperatives that cities must execute to translate potential into competitive leadership from establishing future-ready digital foundations and scalable infrastructure platforms, to engineering deep talent ecosystems and delivering streamlined regulatory frameworks that give global enterprises the certainty to invest at scale.