FM Sitharaman says India must lead GCC shift
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said India must move from hosting global capability centres to leading technology, product and enterprise work for multinational companies.
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Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday said India must move from being a preferred destination for global capability centers (GCCs) to becoming a strategic base where multinational companies build technologies, products and enterprise capabilities.
Addressing the CII GCC Business Summit 2026, Sitharaman said India now hosts more than 2,100 GCCs, employing 2.3 million professionals and generating nearly $100 billion in annual revenue.
She said India is home to more than half of the world’s GCCs, while the pace of expansion has accelerated from one new centre a week in 2024 to about one a day.
“Our aspiration is not merely to host the world’s capability centers, but to shape next-generation technologies and products and enterprises of the future. This is how India moves from capability to leadership,” Sitharaman said.
The finance minister said India’s GCC ecosystem has reached an inflection point, with scale no longer the main measure of success. The next phase, she said, must be driven by innovation, intellectual property, product development and enterprise leadership.
“India’s GCC journey is much larger than the story of one successful sector. It is about making India indispensable to the world’s knowledge economy and strengthening our long-term economic resilience,” she said.
According to the finance minister, India’s value proposition has evolved beyond cost efficiency to capability leadership, with GCCs increasingly taking on global leadership mandates and strategic decision-making responsibilities.
She said enterprises are now prioritising innovation, product development and long-term competitiveness over cost optimisation.
“Not simply to host more GCCs, but to ensure that an increasing share of the world’s ideas, patents, products, algorithms, platforms and enterprise capabilities are conceived, engineered and led from India,” Sitharaman said.
Highlighting future growth opportunities, the minister noted that nearly two-thirds of Fortune Global 2000 companies have yet to establish a GCC in India, describing it as one of the country’s largest untapped investment opportunities.
She said the government is building an enabling policy ecosystem to support the next phase of GCC expansion by reducing regulatory friction, improving policy certainty and encouraging long-term investments. Several measures to support the sector were announced in the Union Budget 2026-27, she added.
Sitharaman also urged industry to work closely with state governments, educational institutions and local communities to prepare Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities for the next wave of GCC investments.
She called on companies to move further up the value chain by creating intellectual property, leading frontier research, developing artificial intelligence applications and strengthening collaboration with India’s research and academic institutions to accelerate the commercialisation of innovation.
