A first-person perspective on the decisions made before a GCC exists, and how they shape whether it ever reaches its mandate.

India has more than 2,100 GCCs employing roughly 2.4 to 2.5 million people [1], and that scale makes setting one up look like a safe decision with a known outcome, which is probably why it gets less scrutiny than it deserves. By failure I mean a GCC that never reaches the mandate it was set up for and is eventually wound down. I do not have a verified rate for how often that happens, so I am not claiming one. Closures reported this year left nearly 350 people without jobs [2], and my view from GCC advisory work is that the causes in cases like these usually trace back to decisions in the board paper that approved the centre.

The first of those decisions is whether the company needs a GCC at all. A competitor is getting the same work done at lower cost through a centre in India, the in-house team is expensive and missing deadlines, and a slide appears with a map of India and an arrow pointing at a city. A trend makes a good slide and a poor business case, because a GCC buys control, capability and long-term ownership of the work, while outsourcing buys output on a defined task with far less commitment. If the only goal is lower cost on work that is already well defined, a contract may do the job without a lease, a leadership team and a legal entity. Even a company that does need a GCC has to be ready for one, with work stable enough to hand over, processes documented well enough to transfer, and managers at headquarters who have time to run the transition alongside their regular responsibilities. Knowledge transfer needs named owners on both sides, time allocated to explain how the work is done, and agreement on when responsibility moves to India. If the people who hold the knowledge are expected to transfer it while continuing to manage their full workload, the transition plan is incomplete before it begins.

The same trend-following shows up in where the centre goes. Imagine a product engineering centre that needs experienced engineers and opens in a city because that city leads every GCC list, only to find that each senior hire takes months longer than the plan assumed and the people it does hire leave for the competitor with the bigger campus. Imagine another that avoids the obvious hub because it looks crowded and ends up somewhere with a thin pool for the roles it needs. These are constructed examples, and the pattern behind them is that the city was picked from a list and the talent need was checked afterwards. The country decision follows the same logic, since some functions fit India’s talent and cost position well, while others depend on closeness to customers, regulators or specialised ecosystems that a cost comparison leaves out.

Cost is where the business case usually goes wrong, because it counts the savings at steady state and the costs at launch. The savings arrive once the centre runs at planned capacity, while the costs arrive first and in more places than the paper shows: the legal entity and compliance setup, senior hires who are paid before there is a team for them to lead, the headquarters team that keeps doing the work during the transition, and the replacement cost of everyone who leaves in the first year. A company that underestimates these ends up with a centre that costs more than the model it replaced for longer than the board expected, and that is when someone asks whether the centre should exist, and whether outsourcing would have been the cheaper route all along.

The fourth decision is the one I find easiest to recognise. A company leases a floor of fifty seats, an empty seat is a visible cost every month, and people get hired to fill the floor the way a restaurant seats strangers at one table when the landlord is watching. The work to give them arrives later than the people did. There is also an organisational design problem: senior resources in India may be hired for their experience, but their roles are often designed around delivery rather than ownership. They are expected to execute decisions made at headquarters, while authority over teams, budgets, technical direction or business processes remains elsewhere. A centre can therefore have experienced people on its payroll without giving them the responsibility needed to build capability or grow into larger roles. Only about a fifth of GCCs in India are reported to hold strategic decision-making authority [3], which I covered in the previous piece in this series. For everyone else, the career ladder stops at a ceiling set in another time zone, so the capable people leave and the ones without options stay, which is not the team the centre was set up to build.

All four decisions are made in a boardroom before the GCC has an address, when nobody has seen what the centre costs or how its people behave, and the only evidence available is what competitors appear to be doing. A centre with no clear mandate is also the easiest one to cut later. A GCC transformation leader quoted by Moneycontrol said India teams face proportional cuts when a parent restructures a division [1], and about half of recent GCC layoffs are attributed to parent-company restructuring [2].

The practical response is to answer five questions in writing, with numbers, before approval.

  1. What work will be done here that a contract could not do?
  2. Which city has the talent pool for exactly those roles?
  3. What do the first two years cost, including parallel running at headquarters and the time headquarters must commit to knowledge transfer?
  4. How many people are needed by month six, what work is lined up for each, and who at headquarters owns the transfer?
  5. Which decisions will be made in India, and what authority will senior roles have to make them?

If the answers are weak, the company has found that out cheaply, and if they are strong, the centre starts with a mandate instead of a lease.

Astravise Services works with companies on GCC advisory, including the build-or-outsource decision, location and the cost model, ahead of setup.

📩 info@astraviseserv.com | astraviseservices.com

This article is intended for informational purposes and reflects the analytical perspective of Astravise Services. Statistical data cited is drawn from publicly available third-party research.

References

[1] AI changes the GCC playbook in India: Up to 30,000 roles could be eliminated | Business Today, 30 September 2026 | https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/ai-changes-the-gcc-playbook-in-india-up-to-30000-roles-could-be-eliminated-558826-2026-09-30

[2] India’s GCCs face layoffs from parent company restructuring and AI | NewsBytes | https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/business/indias-gccs-face-layoffs-from-parent-company-restructuring-and-ai/tldr [3] India GCC List 2026 | V3 Staffing | https://v3staffing.in/blog/india-gcc-list