Emerging cities in India are recording a 42 per cent rise in GCC job openings compared to 19 per cent growth in metro cities, according to the Emerging cities: India’s next frontier for GCC expansion report 2026, released by ANSR.
India is home to 1,900+ GCCs employing over 2.1 million professionals, a model that now contributes more than 1.5% of the country’s GDP. With emerging cities already hosting 220+ GCC units and growing at nearly 11% CAGR, the geographic centre of gravity of India’s GCC landscape is decisively shifting away from traditional metropolitan concentrations.
The report highlights that the vast majority of GCC activity remains concentrated in six Tier-1 metros. However, this dominance is changing as emerging cities strengthen their investment proposition through improved physical connectivity, enhanced digital infrastructure, expanding university ecosystems, competitive operating costs, and proactive state-level policy frameworks.
The 14 emerging cities under assessment
ANSR assessed 14 emerging GCC locations – GIFT City, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Indore, Jaipur, Kochi, Lucknow, Mangalore, Mysuru, Thiruvananthapuram, Navi Mumbai, Visakhapatnam, Bhopal, and Warangal – across four strategic pillars: talent attractiveness, infrastructure readiness, business and regulatory environment, and quality of life.
Each city is assessed for its ability to support high-value, future-focused GCC mandates, not simply as a cost-reduction play. The report emphasizes that the changing scale of GCC operations makes emerging cities more viable. Building teams of 50–100 specialised professionals—rather than large-scale headcounts of several hundred—is significantly more feasible in these locations.
“Emerging cities are no longer alternatives to Tier-1 metros. They are strategic complements within a more resilient and diversified operating model,” said Smitha Hemmigae, managing director, ANSR.
The transformation drivers
The report says that the transformation is being powered by six converging factors, including a rebalancing of talent geography, rapid infrastructure development, a more favourable policy environment and the growing adoption of artificial intelligence technologies.
The report notes that emerging cities offer access to high-quality talent pools that are currently under-leveraged by global enterprises, alongside lower attrition levels and stronger workforce stability.
Emerging cities are benefiting from significant investments in transport and business infrastructure through budget allocations, special economic zone (SEZ) expansions, metro rail projects and airport modernisation programmes. These investments represent both active infrastructure development and policy alignment at the state and national levels.
The report notes that enterprises are reimagining their GCC footprints through distributed network models such as the hub-plus-one approach. In this paradigm, emerging cities are increasingly serving as specialised capability nodes enabling organisations to build focused centres of excellence across areas such as cybersecurity, test engineering, artificial intelligence operations, digital risk, and domain-led analytics.
