By Priyadarshi Nanu Pany, Managing Director & CEO of CSM Technologies Limited
India’s Global Capability Centre (GCC) story has been told through the architecture of scale: expansive campuses, thousands of engineers and the promise of doing more for less. That model transformed Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai into global technology powerhouses. But the next chapter may be written in much smaller rooms.
The country is witness to the emergence of the nano-GCC, a compact, specialized centre that brings together a handful of experts to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) products, engineer critical systems or solve complex industry problems. Its defining feature is not headcount, but the concentration of capability.
The opportunity is substantial. The FICCI-ANAROCK report Workplaces 2025 projects India’s GCC ecosystem to grow to $105 billion to $110 billion by 2030, with more than 2,400 centres employing over 2.8 million professionals.
The question is no longer whether India can attract global operations. It is whether India can capture a greater share of the thinking, invention and intellectual property behind them. Nano-GCCs could help answer that question.
A mid-sized European manufacturer may need 25 specialists in industrial AI. A healthcare company may require a focused bioinformatics team. A financial services firm may want cybersecurity researchers working directly with its global technology leadership. For such companies, a conventional GCC can feel like buying an aircraft when a precision instrument would do.
Smaller teams can shorten decision chains, reduce initial commitments and bring specialists closer to business problems. More importantly, they signal a strategic shift: India’s value proposition is moving from supplying skilled labour to owning complex work.
The Zinnov-Nasscom Mid-Market GCC Report 2025 identified more than 480 mid-market GCCs in India, employing over 210,000 professionals. These centres represent a broader shift towards specialised operations and higher-value work, although mid-market GCCs and nano-GCCs are not interchangeable categories.
The appeal is also operational. Industry estimates suggest nano-GCCs can become functional in eight to twelve weeks, compared with twelve to eighteen months for traditional setups. These timelines vary by sector, regulatory requirements and operating model, but the underlying proposition is compelling: companies can test an idea, validate its commercial value and scale only when the evidence warrants it. Smallness, in this context, is not a constraint. It is a form of strategic insurance.
This creates an opening for cities beyond India’s established technology metros. Bhubaneswar deserves particular attention. The Odisha Economic Survey 2025–26 identifies the city as an emerging GCC destination, citing cost competitiveness, a growing talent pool, technology infrastructure and improving connectivity. Its educational institutions, established IT and IT-enabled services presence, and expanding startup ecosystem offer a foundation for specialised centres in AI, analytics, engineering and digital services.
The policy environment is becoming more supportive, too. The Odisha government approved its GCC Policy 2025 in November 2025. The policy offers support encompassing capital investment, recruitment, rentals, skilling, research and development, and intellectual property creation. Its ambitions include attracting more than Rs 1,000 crore in investments, developing at least five GCC hubs across regions including Bhubaneswar-Cuttack-Puri-Paradip, and generating over 50,000 direct and indirect jobs.
For Bhubaneswar, the opportunity is to attract not merely satellite offices but compact, high-value teams that own products, develop intellectual property and participate in global decision-making. Its cost advantages matter, but its long-term proposition must rest on specialised talent, reliable infrastructure, industry-academia collaboration and the ability to retain experienced professionals. The city’s potential will be realised when global firms see it not simply as a cheaper alternative to Bengaluru, but as a distinctive source of innovation.
Yet nano-GCCs should not be romanticised. Small teams are vulnerable to attrition, key-person dependency and thin management structures. A compact centre can also become an isolated satellite if headquarters retains all meaningful decision-making overseas. Without budgets, product ownership and access to executive leadership, even a talented Indian team risks becoming a low-cost execution unit wearing an innovation badge.
There is another danger. If states compete primarily through subsidies without investing in research, skills and infrastructure, India could create a landscape of subsidised offices rather than a durable innovation economy. Incentives can help a centre open its doors; they cannot manufacture expertise or a culture of invention. Nor should nano-GCCs become an excuse to neglect large centres, whose investments, employment and institutional capabilities remain indispensable.
The strategic objective, therefore, is not to replace scale with smallness. It is to abandon the assumption that scale must always come first. India’s next generation of GCCs could resemble a network of precision workshops rather than a handful of industrial fortresses: each small enough to move quickly, specialised enough to solve difficult problems and connected enough to draw on a vast national talent pool. Bhubaneswar could become an important node in that network if policy ambition translates into durable business activity and high-value employment.
India has already demonstrated that the world can entrust it with work at scale. The next test is whether the world will entrust it with the ideas that shape what comes next. Nano-GCCs may offer a compelling route to that transition, provided success is measured not by how little they cost or how quickly they open, but by how much consequential work they own.