ANSR launched the Emerging Cities: India’s Next Frontier for GCC Expansion Report 2026, a first-of-its-kind, data-driven assessment of India’s most promising Tier-2 GCC destinations and their readiness to support the next wave of global enterprise expansion.
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. Yet the vast majority of this activity remains concentrated in six Tier-1 metros. That is changing. 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.
“Emerging cities are no longer alternatives to Tier-I metros. They are strategic complements within a more resilient and diversified operating model,” said Smitha Hemmigae, Managing Director, ANSR. “The next chapter of India’s GCC story will not be defined by concentration, but by distribution, by the ability of enterprises to build agile, capability-led networks across a wider geographic canvas. The enterprises that recognise this early, and act with conviction, will define the next decade.”
The report evaluates 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 findings reveal a structural inflection point driven by six converging forces: a talent geography rebalancing that is seeing emerging cities record 42% growth in GCC job openings versus 19% in metro hubs; an infrastructure gap that is closing rapidly through budget allocations, SEZ expansions, metro buildouts, and airport modernisation; and a policy environment transformed by the Union Budget 2025’s national guidance framework — the first coordinated, government-backed push to build GCC-ready ecosystems beyond India’s major metros. Layered on top is the impact of AI, which is steadily narrowing the capability divide between Tier-1 and Tier-2 locations, and opening new possibilities for enterprises to build distributed, high-impact delivery networks.
The report also identifies five strategic imperatives that cities must execute to translate potential into competitive leadership — from establishing future-ready digital foundations and scalable infrastructure platforms, to engineering deep talent ecosystems and delivering low-friction regulatory architecture that gives global enterprises the certainty to invest at scale.
The Emerging Cities of today are the innovation nodes of tomorrow. The window of strategic opportunity is open. The question is which enterprises will move first.