How Emerging Cities Are Redefining India's Technology Landscape
A seasoned professional and author, Yogesh has spent over a decade observing India’s evolving technology ecosystem, and tracking how Global Capability Centers (GCCs) are reshaping patterns of work, talent, and innovation. With a special interest in Tier-II cities and their rise, the author has analyzed policy changes, company strategies, and infrastructure developments to understand where the tech wave is heading next in India.
In this article, Yogesh highlights the transformative rise of Tier-2 cities as powerful new engines in India’s evolving GCC landscape.
Once, the story of India’s GCC boom was told through the skylines of Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, and Chennai. These Tier-1 cities were the magnet: all the talent and capital, and infrastructure came in. Now, a new story is being written, one of promise for decentralization, of untapped potential, and of opportunity spreading beyond the usual hubs. The rise of Tier-2 cities as GCC hubs is not just a trend, it is becoming one of the most important shifts in the country’s tech landscape.
The rise of Tier-2 cities as GCC hubs is not just a trend it is becoming one of the most important shifts in India’s tech landscape.
A New Horizon Emerging
Imagine a young engineer in Coimbatore or Bhubaneswar, with a degree in engineering or data science, who once felt they had to move to a metro to access opportunity. Today, companies are increasingly locating work in her hometown. Tier-2 locations are drawing attention because they offer a powerful mix of lower operating costs, improved infrastructure, and a growing base of tech-ready and capable talent. Cities like Jaipur, Indore, Vadodara, and Kochi are showing up on GCC expansion maps, not as afterthoughts, but by design.
A turning point in this shift was the COVID-19 pandemic. When lockdowns forced remote work, many professionals moved to smaller cities or preferred staying closer to home. With remote or hybrid work becoming normalized, firms saw that operations could continue effectively outside metros. The pandemic triggered and expedited Tier-2 city expansion. Companies, having seen value in location flexibility, began seriously considering Tier-2 locales for GCC growth. This is reflected in recent reports for example, hiring in Tier-2 cities surged 21% year-over-year in 2025 among GCC job postings, compared to slower growth in metros.
Why Tier-2 Is Suddenly Compelling
Several forces have aligned to give rise to this revolution. First, the talent pool in Tier-2 cities is increasingly competitive. Universities and engineering colleges across India are producing graduates skilled in modern technologies, and with some investment in training and leadership, many perform as well as their counterparts in big cities. Many freshers are now landing GCC jobs in their hometowns, something uncommon a few years ago.
Second, cost advantages are becoming too significant to ignore. Real estate, salaries, amenities, and operations in Tier-2 cities are often much cheaper. With metros facing high attrition, inflated costs, and congestion, firms are seeing Tier-2 cities as viable levers for sustainable operations. Governments, too, are leaning in, offering subsidies, tax breaks, policy incentives, and infrastructure upgrades to make GCC setups in smaller cities more attractive.
Third, quality of life improvements are real. Better connectivity (internet, roads, air links), co-working spaces, and remote infrastructure have improved significantly. Many people now prefer shorter commutes, lower living expenses, and staying closer to family. These preferences, born through the COVID era, have become durable, pushing GCCs to rethink location strategies. The work-from-home or hybrid norms unlocked by COVID allowed many to test living in Tier-2 spaces without sacrificing productivity, encouraging firms to follow.
What’s Changing in How GCCs Operate
GCCs in Tier-2 cities are not only increasing in number, their nature is evolving. Rather than being confined to repetitive or back-office tasks, they are now taking on mid-office work, engineering, analytics, automation, and domain-specific projects. The focus is shifting from headcount to capability.
Firms are also embracing hybrid delivery and hub-and-spoke models: strategic leadership often remains in traditional metro hubs, but much of delivery, hiring, and operations are now decentralized. This helps mitigate risk (for example, over-dependence on one city) and ensures continuity across geographies.
Also Read: How GCCs Are Quietly Powering Global Tech Strategy
Challenges to Watch and Plans to Address Them
This revolution doesn’t come without friction:
Infrastructure Gaps: In many Tier-2 cities, reliable electricity, high-speed internet, and commercial real estate remain inconsistent.
Availability of talent for specialized roles: It is still difficult to attract senior leadership, niche tech skills, domain specialists to smaller cities.
Cultural perceptions and employer branding: Since most people still think of real tech work as happening in metro hubs, hiring and retaining the best talent in Tier-2 requires strong branding, compelling career paths, and visibility.
Quality and Consistency: Corporate culture, expectations of performance, and standards of communication must be managed across dispersed teams.
How these are being addressed:
- Companies are investing in local upskilling programs, training partnerships with local universities, and ‘skill labs’ to build pipelines in specialized skills.
- Governments are accelerating infrastructure investment, such as roads, data centers, and power supplies, and pushing policy incentives for GCCs in smaller cities.
- Employers are adapting employer branding strategies for Tier-2 locations; success stories, local leadership presence, and engagement through remote leadership are facilitating the shift in perception.
- Standardized processes and governance, along with remote tools, make sure that both performance metrics and culture are aligned. Distributive leadership models have regular leadership visits, hybrid work norms, and strong local leadership roles to bridge the gap in metro versus Tier-2 expectations.
Why the Tier-2 GCC Revolution Matters
This is not just a movement to save costs or spread operations; it's actually one for inclusion and opportunity. The opening of GCCs in Tier-2 cities helps to further diversify talent, lessen the pressure of migration, and provide tech careers to communities usually bypassed. The economic growth becomes more evenly distributed, easing burdens in metropolitan areas: traffic, housing costs, pollution, and infrastructure strain. Tier-2 expansion for companies brings along risk diversification, lower operating costs, and often lower attrition.
Teams rooted in local communities tend to stay longer, find better work-life balance, and thus help deliver more consistent outcomes over time. Firms that anticipate and adapt to these changes will build more resilient, stable operations.
The Road Ahead
Over the next few years, expect the GCC map in India to spread more widely, deepening in cities like Jaipur, Coimbatore, Indore, and Bhubaneswar. Offices will be built, local leadership will emerge, and hybrid work models will further mature. Governments will continue to roll out policies and infrastructure investment.
Recent data (like the 21% YoY spike in GCC hiring in Tier-2 in 2025, and projections that India’s GCC workforce will exceed 2.2 million by 2026, up from about 1.9 million in 2024) clearly shows an upward slope accelerated by COVID. The Hindu Business Line expects the GCC sector to continue expanding rapidly under this trajectory.
The story of India’s tech journey is being rewritten, not only by what cities are growing, but who is growing. In this meaningful shift, Taipei-to-Tier-2 GCCs are not tomorrow’s promise, they are today’s reality. And they are lifting more people, more cities, and more dreams than ever before.
