Why Every Consulting Firm is Suddenly Obsessed With India's GCC Market

2026-06-30 — management consulting India

I was in a client meeting last week when someone mentioned they'd just signed their third GCC setup mandate. Three. In the span of twelve months.

That's not normal.

What I'm looking at now is a market that's fundamentally different from five years ago. India's hosting over 2,100 Global Capability Centers at this point. JLL's latest data shows they're pulling in 38% of office leasing across the seven biggest Indian cities. That's not a niche anymore. That's the market.

The scale is genuinely hard to overstate. These centers employ something close to two million people. They're moving over 1% of India's entire GDP. In Q1 alone, GCCs absorbed 9.1 million square feet of office space. Most people underestimate what that number really means for the commercial property market, let alone for the firms trying to serve it.

Every consulting firm with a pulse has noticed.

EY runs an entire dedicated practice around this work. Alvarez and Marsal—usually known for restructuring, not site selection—has planted themselves in Gurgaon. There are smaller firms everywhere now, some spun out of bigger consultancies, others founded exactly for this moment. And they're all chasing the same thing: the call that comes when a Fortune 500 company decides to open a center in Bengaluru or Hyderabad.

Here's what matters: about 70% of GCC demand comes from US-headquartered companies, which means there's a very specific decision-maker in New York or San Francisco who needs someone on the ground. They need regulatory help. They need real estate advice. They need to understand talent markets. They need governance frameworks. All that happens before you hire your first person.

The mandate itself has matured.

Early on, this was location selection and compliance checklists. Now? We're pitching operating model design. Talent strategy. Long-term capability planning. Actually, that's not quite right—some clients are still looking for cost arbitrage, but the ones who've been in India longest have figured out that these centers can be actual hubs, not just back-office operations. Goldman Sachs runs enormous operations out of India. So does JPMorgan. Google too. That's difficult to dismiss as a cost play.

New setups are opening at 11-13% annually. Around 110 centers came online between 2024 and 2025. NASSCOM is projecting the whole thing hits $99-105 billion in revenue by 2030. For a consulting firm, that projection is more or less a multi-year pipeline guarantee. Every center is years of engagement: setup, then scaling, then whatever comes after that.

The geography problem nobody talks about

Delhi NCR has roughly 270 centers. Bengaluru's still the biggest single destination. But Hyderabad and Pune are pulling significant volume now. If your firm built your entire GCC practice assuming this was Bengaluru-only, you're already behind. The geographic spread requires actual capacity across multiple cities, not just a flagship office in one tech district.

But here's the real tension.

Everyone assumes GCC advisory keeps growing, and it probably does. The actual question is different: who captures the premium work? The setup mandate is getting commoditized. Any competent firm can walk you through entity structure and HR compliance. The firms actually pulling ahead are the ones making credible claims about operating model design and workforce strategy. That requires a completely different kind of partner than the location-selection firms who built their practices in 2018.

India's GCC market crossed 2,100 because the equation still works. Cost, talent, scale—it's better here than almost anywhere else. That won't change in the near term. As long as it doesn't, consulting firms sitting in this space have something they don't often get: a reliable pipeline.