Revision as of 19:22, 21 August 2024

Benefits to the Indian economy

Till 2024, early

SWAMINATHAN S ANKLESARIA AIYAR/ This brainpower flex is India’s best-kept secret/ The Times of India/ 26 May 2024

The unanticipated but phenomenal rise of Global Capability Centres (GCCs) of multinationals has been India’s greatest economic achievement in 2014-2024. These have made India a global hub for brainpower with no hoopla but to stunning effect.

According to a recent study by Wizmatic, a Pune-based consultant, GCCs now employ 3.2 million Indians, mostly engineers and scientists. They are estimated to generate a total revenue of $121 billion, of which $102 billion represents export earnings. That makes GCCs one of the biggest sectors in India, as well as saviours of the balance of payments.

In 2023-24, Indian exports of goods were $437 billion, and the trade gap in goods was a whopping $240 billion. But this was closed substantially by the trade surplus in services (to which GCCs contribute) of $162 billion. It saved our bacon.

Yet, paradoxically, this owes very little to government policies. It is an outcome of globalisation, of international forces that have driven technical jobs across the world to where the brains are. The West does not produce remotely enough STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) graduates to meet its needs. Apart from China, India is the only country in the world producing an estimated 2.3 million STEM graduates per year, of whom half a million are engineers. Once of spotty quality, MNC confidence in them has risen sharply.

Initially, GCCs were called offshore captives of MNCs. At that time, they performed simple tasks like call centre operations and back-office work. As India’s skills developed, GCCs moved up the value chain into business process operations and software for their parent companies. Now, they have moved up further to become global MNC hubs for R&D, design, and artificial intelligence.

They constitute a financial black box because they have no separate balance sheets. MNCs often want to downplay their Indian operations for fear of being accused of exporting jobs. IBM, for instance, stopped giving a country-wise break up of its employees when its India numbers looked embarrassingly high. Accenture, the world’s top consultancy company, said a few years ago that 3 lakh of its 7 lakh worldwide workforce was in India, a stunning ratio.

The first revelation of the meteoric rise of GCCs came in a 2021 Nasscom-Deloitte report. It said that between 2015 and 2020, GCC employment rose 75% to 1.3 million, and their number rose to more than 1,400. GCC revenues increased to $33.8 billion.

Moreover, GCCs provided many indirect benefits through maintenance, transport, suppliers and other linkages. Nasscom-Deloitte estimated that the gross output of all taken together was $99-103 billion in 2019-20, employment was 5.2 to 5.5 million, and taxes paid were $4-5 billion. Top engineering MNCs now depend on India for brainpower. The report estimated at the time that no less than 42% of GCC staff were in engineering R&D. General Electric, Volkswagen, and Mercedes Benz were all using India for engineering R&D.

But engineering is now only a minor part of the story. The MNC list has expanded to cover global retailers like Target and Tesco. Global pharma companies are notoriously worried about patents leaking out and have been slow to come in, but Roche is here.

From just in-house software, many GCCs went into producing Software as a Service (SaaS), a major revenue generator. But the most explosive growth has now been in AI. All top companies are now using India as a base for AI design and development.

The Deloitte Technology Trends 2024 report highlights the growth and global dominance of India’s GCCs, predicting that it will surpass $100 billion by 2030, fuelled by the emergence of approximately 2,500 more GCCs employing over 4.5m.

Salaries/ compensation

As in 2024

Shilpa Phadnis, May 29, 2024: The Times of India

GCCs have emerged as great paymasters, outshining their IT services peers. Around 100 Indian GCCs have top leaders netting nearly $1 million in annual compensation, including cash and stock rewards, says Lalit Ahuja, founder of consulting firm ANSR. These roles include India site leaders and SVPs who lead technology functions.


Other roles too have seen a good increase in salaries. ANSR’s research shows that the average salaries for those who have around seven years of experience in digital roles have increased by 33% to $45,000 (Rs 38 lakh) in 2024, from $33,000 (Rs 28 lakh) in 2021. On the other hand, the median remuneration of employees in an IT services company in India was around Rs 9 lakh ($11,000) in FY23, up from Rs 5 lakh ($7,400) in FY15 – a CAGR of 8% over the last eight years, in line with industry revenue growth, says a report by Goldman Sachs.


Consulting firm Zinnov estimates that GCCs gave increments of 12.6% last year, even as most major IT services com- panies deferred salary increments or gave it only to select few top performers. Those at junior levels in GCCs received on average 13.2% increments. Top performers, Zinnov says, received average increments of 20.2%.


An HSBC report highlights that GCCs’ cost per head is 30%-40% higher than that of Indian IT services providers, given that GCCs have traditionally hired laterally, and have far fewer freshers. GCCs also give higher salaries for the same level. However, as IT service providers have a significant offshore markup (pricing over costs), GCCs’ cost per head is 20-25% cheaper than the billing rate of service providers, says HSBC analysts Yogesh Aggarwal and Prateek Maheshwari.


An EY report says that the overall cost of a full-time employee in a GCC will increase from the current average levels of $29,100, to $37,760 by 2030. According to its research, the cost per employee has increased by 27% from the year 2019 to 2023. However, it is expected to increase by 30% from now until 2030.

Retail GCCs

2021

Avik Das1, January 13, 2021: The Times of India

Retail GCCs in India and employees, as in 2020
From: Avik Das1, January 13, 2021: The Times of India

“We are not here for cost; it is about talent, capability and building a team to support various functions, including our online platform. Our Bengaluru office is the engine room for analytics,” says John Kenny, director of KAS Services, the India tech arm of Australia’s biggest discount department retailer, Kmart.

The company is among the numerous global retailers that are establishing technology centres in India, or expanding existing ones, to become more digital, so that they can take on the likes of Amazon and Alibaba. The Covid-19 pandemic has only underlined the urgency – the internet is where customers increasingly want to buy on, and without a digital backbone, supply chains can get badly disrupted.

Bengaluru is home to the majority of these centres – Walmart, Target, Tesco, Lowe’s, JCPenney, Hudson Bay, L Brands, Ikea, Falabella. Not one has a single store here (an Ikea is coming up), but they are all developing new technology to make the shopping experience pleasant.

“The retail industry represents the highest levels when it comes to maturity of global capability centres (GCCs, as the captive centres are now called). They have become strategic to their parent companies,” says Lalit Ahuja, CEO of ANSR, a company that helps set up such centres in India. “Retail was slow to Amazon-ise, and now these retail centres are coming up to drive change and bring new technology and innovation,” he says.

India has nearly two decades of experience in retail tech. Target and Tesco came to Bengaluru in the early 2000s to consolidate back-office operations and make them more efficient with the use of IT. Flipkart’s emergence and Amazon’s entry, and their intense rivalry added to the retail tech talent pool. The new retail GCCs are benefitting from this talent. “The country now has extremely relevant talent – talent that understands all aspects of retail,” says Lalitha Indrakanti, head of global business operations for Sweden’s Ingka Group, which runs Ikea, and which recently established a global business operations cum digital centre in India.

Chilean retailer Falabella’s India centre has built the point-of-sale (PoS) system for its stores in seven Latin American countries, and integrated its indigenous e-wallet in the retail ecosystem. The centre also manages the e-commerce operations and digs into data to provide more personal experiences.

“Falabella has multiple retail formats, and a host of other businesses including financial payments, banking & insurance, driven by the goal to build an ecosystem for our customers. It requires a holistic technology transformation across the conglomerate. We knew it wouldn’t be possible to do that in Chile or anywhere in Latin America alone, so we chose India as a key location, given the talent pool,” Ashish Grover, MD of Falabella India, says.

The digital acceleration is taking place across ten key retail themes, consultancy firm Zinnov says. These include automated checkout, contactless payments, omnichannel inventory management, warehouse automation, stores as fulfilment centres for online orders, autonomous last-mile delivery, virtual trials, assisted shopping, social commerce, and move to marketplaces. It estimates that globally, the retail sector has invested in three years’ worth of digital transformation within six months, spurred by the pandemic.

Walmart’s engineers in India have helped build the tech stack for the US supply chain and have developed tech solutions for its Mexican e-commerce platform. They are reimagining in-store and online shopping experiences.

US home department chain Lowe’s centre in Bengaluru is involved in developing and pricing products. It has product management, engineering, data analytics and operations teams in India that help manage assortments at the stores, pricing, inventory and store design.

Kmart’s Kenny says one of the advantages of having a base in Bengaluru is the presence of other retailers, which facilitates sharing and learning unlike other places. “The team here works on high-end technology. We have built PoS solutions, we have built solutions that make teams more effective. We have a demand fulfillment team that allows us to forecast stock in store a lot more accurately,” he says.

Minneapolis-based Target started in India as a shared services centre. Today, the centre supports global strategy across technology, marketing, human resources, finance, merchandising, supply chain, analytics, and reporting. The company says the work involves creating highvalue tools and products to create a competitive advantage.

Retail GCCs, says KS Viswanathan, vice president of industry initiatives at Nasscom, are increasingly working on services like marketing, social media campaigns, designs for new shops and managing e-commerce operations and online customer experience. And are providing analytics and insights.

The status of GCCx in India

2022: India’s rise as GCC hub

SWAMINATHAN S ANKLESARIA AIYAR, India’s rise as GCC hub shows way forward

One form of globalisation is progressing rapidly without much recognition. This is the rise of Global Capability Centres (GCCs). Nasscom (National Association of Software and Service Companies) estimates that by 2021 more than 1,400 MNCs (multinational corporations) set up GCCs in India, employing 1. 3 million highly skilled people with a revenue of $36 billion. Nasscom projects that by 2025 India could have 2,000 GCCs employing 2 million people and generating $60 billion of revenue.

Many Indian start-ups have been created by former employees of the GCCs. Thus, skills nurtured by GCCs spill over into other sectors. This helped India create 100 unicorns (unlisted start-ups with an estimated market value of over one billion dollars).

The rise of GCCs has escaped attention because MNCs do not publish separate balance sheets for offshore operations, in India or anywhere else. Many MNCs have no interest in highlighting the growth of their GCCs because it might open them to accusations of exporting jobs to low-wage countries. Once, high-level skills were available only in advanced economies. Today MNCs cannot get enough skilled staff in their home countries and so search the world. They find India is a major source of talent.

Back in the 1990s, foreign companies began offshoring low-level work like call-centres and medical transcriptions to India and other developing countries. Next computer software and business processes were offshored on a large scale after 1998. Much offshored work went to Indian companies but an increasing amount was also done by captive centres of MNCs in India, an in-house form of offshoring. These centres have now risen in sophistication and technical excellence to become GCCs that are global hubs for design and R&D. Nasscom estimates that 42% of employees in GCCs are in engineering R&D.

Ironically, education in India is terrible overall. Schools and colleges produce millions of semi-literate students who are unemployable. Yet India also has some world-class educational institutions that are expanding in both the public and private sectors. MNC managers say that no other coun-try (save China) produces half a million engineering graduates of decent quality every year. Doing business in India can be tough, but fierce competition for talent obliges MNCs to come to India, in services if not manufacturing. Deloitte estimates that 45% of the world’s GCCs are in India. Accenture, the world’s biggest consultancy company, recently revealed that of its 700,000 employees worldwide, no less than 300,000 were in India. Goldman Sachs reportedly plans to expand its Indian GCC to 2,500 employees by 2023. IBM and CapGemini have over 100,000 employees in India.

Historically pharma MNCs were reluctant to expand in India for fear of losing their intellectual property rights to Indians who were seen as expert “copycats. ” Today Indian skills have gone well beyond mere copying and so MNCs are beefing up their R&D centres in India. AstraZeneca had a great collaboration with Serum Institute of India to produce anti-Covid vaccines that saved millions of lives globally. AstraZeneca now plans a GCC in India.

The status in 2023

June 15, 2023: The Times of India

On the eastern side of Bengaluru, sits a campus housing three cube-like glass buildings. Each is 10 storeys high, with facades glistening in the sun.


These are the offices of Goldman Sachs group, home to about 8,000 workers, the bank’s largest venue outside New York. When Goldman set up in the city in 2004, it had roughly 300 people mainly providing information technology and other support. Now, its workers are quants and software engineers, building systems for everything from making trades to managing risk.


Across India, the offices set up by multinationals to provide cheap operational support are taking on more sophisticated roles. While the shift has been underway for years, recent economic data highlights a rapid service-sector expansion that many attribute to the offices known as global capability centres (GCCs).


These now account for more than 1% of India’s gross domestic product (GDP). But the boom also creates challenges, both for the companies and the cities that host them. Finding qualified employees is becoming more difficult, pushing salaries up, while offshoring may become politically sensitive again in the US presidential race.


 The pull of India 


“Over the last 30 years, while China specialised in becoming the world’s factory, India specialised in becoming the world’s back office,” said Duvvuri Subbarao, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India. “Over the years, India moved up the value chain,” he said. But it can’t “take its comparative advantage for granted”.
India has roughly 1,600 of the centres, more than 40% of the number worldwide, according to Nasscom, a trade body for the technology industry.


Dotted around Bengaluru are the offices of luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue, aircraft-engine maker Rolls Royce, US bank Wells Fargo and Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten. Some 66 global companies set up their first GCC in India in 2022. Even the lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret has a Bengaluru GCC.


The offices generated about $46bn in combined revenue in the fiscal year ended March, more than the output of Nepal.


The qualities that turned India into the world’s back office starting decades ago are propelling GCCs’ metamorphosis: A vast pool of young people, an education system that emphasises science and technology, and the lower staffing costs that made India attractive in the first place.

Add an unforeseen catalyst: The pandemic, which convinced decision-makers jobs can be done anywhere, including far-flung shores.

“India’s story starts with its demographics and its talent,” said Gunjan Samtani, the country head of Goldman Sachs Services, the entity that operates the bank’s GCCs in India. A software engineer by trade, he still codes from time to time. “What brought us here even two decades back was our ability to get access to technology and talent.”

More than a back office

Last year, a mysterious surge appeared in the country’s economic data. Services exports rose to a record for December, leading economists to speculate why. The trend continued. They climbed to about $323bn in the fiscal year ended March, up 27% from the year before. Analysts reached the same conclusion: It was the GCCs.

GCCs have been driving the exuberance in services exports, Pranjul Bhandari, HSBC Holdings' chief economist for India and Indonesia, and colleagues wrote in a report in March, calling it a “meaningful” shift in India’s economy.

Its significance went beyond the boost in output. The increase helped narrow the country’s current-account deficit, which in turn could support a rupee that’s been depreciating for years.

It was an important moment for a business that’s been in the making for decades. Global capability centres trace their roots to the 1980s, when Texas Instruments established a facility in Bengaluru.

India took off as an outsourcing hub in the 1990s, when airlines, technology companies and firms including American Express and General Electric set up centres in the country. The facilities took over business processes including accounting, payroll and customer support, with lower labour expenses allowing companies to cut costs.

The multinationals soon saw they could use their India offices for more than back-office functions. Today, they often handle core operations, such as inventory management or purchasing, while also using AI and other advanced technologies to improve how businesses run.

Retailer Target is working on new systems for order collection and shipping. At Goldman, engineers have helped develop a trading system called Atlas for quant clients with latency in microseconds. They’ve also expanded a commodities platform called Janus, which provides data analytics.

“The conversation has changed completely,” said Sindhu Gangadharan, senior vice-president and managing director of SAP Labs India. Cost is “a beautiful advantage that we have, but that’s not the conversation starter like it was 20 years back”.

SAP Labs India is now responsible for almost 40% of software firm SAP’s global research and development and a quarter of its patents annually, Gangadharan said.

Goldman’s GCCs carry out more than 120 global functions across engineering and business operations. JPMorgan Chase employs more than 50,000 people at GCCs in five locations across India, in areas including quant research, data science and cloud computing.

GCCs “are now following a very different path”, said Lalit Ahuja, the founder and chief executive officer of ANSR, a consultancy that has helped clients establish more than 100 of the centres in India. He says he sets up two every month and has never been busier.

The pandemic changed everything by making remote work more acceptable, Ahuja said. The industry came of age in the last few years, he said.

Huge talent pool

One of India’s biggest attractions is its supply of workers. In April, it overtook China as the world’s most populous country. It’s now home to almost a fifth of humanity, and more than half its population is under 30, with a median age of 28. That compares to 38 in both the US and China.

In a nation obsessed with education, many parents want their children to take subjects that will help them get good jobs and careers. Some 34% of students study science, technology, engineering or mathematics at university, the highest among major economies, according to Unesco Institute for Statistics data.

And these days, India’s thriving startup scene is also a boon for companies setting up GCCs and seeking people to hire. India has about 90,000 startups, the third-biggest number of any country in the world.

But the surge in GCCs is making it harder to find employees and creating a need to pay them more. Companies are forming ties with academia to develop hiring pipelines.

SAP Labs India has a partnership with engineering school Birla Institute Of Technology and Science, Pilani. Goldman runs an annual contest called GS Quantify for students to find solutions to real-world financial problems. Samtani says the bank gets job applications from more than 1,100 campuses in 20 states.

“The war for talent definitely exists,” SAP Labs India’s Gangadharan said.

Even before competition for staff intensified, companies needed to spend much time training new hires, according to Dileep Mangsuli, executive director and head of the development centre at Siemens Healthineers, a medical-technology company involved in imaging and diagnostics, which now does half its software and digital-services research and development (R&D) in India. Good jobs exist in the country, but the booming education industry often doesn’t adequately prepare people to do them.

The employability of new graduates “is still a challenge”, he said. “Till they’re trained and retrained and many times trained, they don’t become employable.”


As GCCs use more advanced technologies, they’re also finding it harder to find staff. An example is artificial intelligence. India has about 416,000 AI workers, far short of the more than 1mn it will need by 2026, according to Nasscom.


Not an easy road ahead


Making the most of India’s demographic advantages “will require significant investments and government attention”, said Partha Iyengar, the country leader for research at Gartner in India. Only 30-40% of graduates in India are employable, he estimates.
“Not enough attention is being given to this, given the massive scale of intervention required”, he said. “If that is not done on a war footing, the demographic dividend can very easily and quickly turn into a demographic disaster.”


The boom is also adding to challenges for India’s cities, especially Bengaluru.


Home to about 30% of the country’s GCCs, India’s tech capital is constantly congested. As work continues on expanding the metro system, large stretches of the city are dug up, resulting in long traffic jams. Last year, torrential rain caused floods across key roads, forcing chief executive officers to ride to work on tractors.

Multinationals are setting up in other places. Hyderabad is emerging as a popular location. Goldman opened its second India GCC there in 2021 with a focus on consumer-banking services and business analytics. Pune is another favoured destination, as are some areas near New Delhi.


Another risk is that Donald Trump will revive his campaign against offshoring of jobs as he runs for president again in 2024. Data sovereignty — another argument for keeping jobs at home — could also become an issue.


Still, Nasscom estimates India will have at least 1,900 GCCs by 2025, and annual revenue from the industry will increase to as much as $60bn. “India can overcome the geopolitical challenges because such a large talent pool is not available elsewhere,” said K S Viswanathan, the trade body’s vice-president of industry initiatives.


At Goldman, Samtani shares the optimism. He points out the bank had one managing director in the city in 2004. Today, in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, 58 people have reached the coveted rank.
“If India is not part of the talent story for any firm globally, they’re missing something,” he said.

The Top GCCs in India /2023

The Top GCCs in India in 2023, industry-wise
From: May 29, 2024: The Times of India

See graphic:

The Top GCCs in India in 2023, industry-wise

As in 2024 April

Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis, TNN, May 29, 2024: The Times of India

GCCs in India, 2010-2023
From: Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis, TNN, May 29, 2024: The Times of India

WILL THE NEXT SATYA NADELLA SIT OUT OF INDIA?

American firms have more employees in India than in any other foreign country

TOI, and Times Techies in particular, have been tracking the meteoric rise of GCCs for years now.

Late 2023 , we wrote, based on consultancy Zinnov’s estimates, that more than 5,000 global leaders of MNCs are sitting out of India GCCs. These are not just tech leaders, but also operations’ leaders, including, significantly, the chief customer officer of US data protection and management company Commvault (by that yardstick, the possibility of a Nadella sitting out of India isn’t far-fetched). Zinnov estimates this number will rise to 30,000 by 2030. In February, we wrote, based on consultancy Wizmatic’s estimates, that the GCC revenue figure of $46 billion that Nasscom put out for 2022-23 could be a gross underestimate, that it could actually be more than $100 billion. That’s more than 3% of India’s GDP.

GAINING GLOBAL ATTENTION


Today, the India GCC phenomenon has caught international imagination. The Economist magazine has just written articles on it, pointing out also that American firms have 1.5 million staff in India, more than in any other foreign country. They note the substantial contribution of GCCs to India’s GDP, and more particularly the country’s services exports. They point out that GCCs could do to India what FDI into China’s manufacturing did for that country. And the value brought in could be even more significant, considering what’s moving into India is the knowledge base of the world.


Ankur Mittal, SVP of technology & MD for India at Lowe’s, the $86-billion US retailer specialising in home improvement and which has a 5,000-strong GCC in India, says US companies have realised that talent availability in India is “far superior to most other locations

EASIER TO TRANSFORM 
Ahuja says it’s easy to build a large-scale team in India that can be trusted to drive business outcomes with certainty and predictability. “A company like Best Buy that is just coming into India can hire from Walmart, Target, Lowe’s, Amazon, and even Microsoft and Google. They can hire teams within weeks that can build enterprise-grade capabilities and help in digital transformation. A Cigna comes to India and can do 10,000 people in three years,” he says.


UNDER-ONE-ROOF ADVANTAGE


Another huge India advantage is the possibility of housing di verse talent under one roof, which almost every MNC today is consciously putting in place. Mittal notes the presence of technology, design, product management, data science, AI and even business talent like marketing and merchandising in Lowe’s Bengaluru facility.

CUTTING-EDGE WORK


Over 120 global functions across business and engineering are carried out from Goldman Sachs’s India GCCs that have 8,500 employees. Over the last two decades, functions performed from India have evolved from end-of-day support for trading platforms and exchange connectivity, to algo trading platform support, data analytics, and client reporting.

A major project that the India centre led is Atlas, a low-latency trading platform that hosts a suite of trading strategies to help clients achieve their trading objectives, perform historical analyses, build quantitative models with real-time market information and trade execution. This platform helped trim microseconds in execution of trades for Goldman Sachs’ clients. “This latency reduction helped us engage existing and newer hedge funds and quant clients,” Samtani says.


JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest bank, has some 55,000 people in its India GCCs. Deepak Mangla, CEO of corporate centres for India & Philippines at the bank, says the India GCC is a microcosm of practically all lines of businesses and functions, not just technology. “We manage operations for the bank, we engage extensively in risk management, we perform significant work for finance and HR controls,” he says.


Among several path-breaking work done at Lowe’s India is what’s called LORMN (Lowe’s One Roof Media Network). It was conceptualised in India and is among the fastest growing retail ad networks in the US. It allows vendors to put ads on Lowe’s website and other sites.

Women in GCCs

2022-23

May 1, 2024: The Times of India

Gender diversity in GCCs
From: May 1, 2024: The Times of India

Bengaluru : Indian global capability centres (GCCs) have made significant strides in gender diversity, with nearly five lakh women currently employed in the sector. This represents 28% of the total 16 lakh employees working in GCCs across India, as shown in the Pure Storage and Zinnov report titled “Towards a Gender Equitable World”. Within the deep tech ecosystem, gender diversity stands at 23%.


Despite this positive development, it highlights the substantial ground that still needs to be covered to bridge the diversity gap in the industry. With only 6.7% of women in executive roles in GCCs and 5.1% in deep tech organisations, there is a considerable decrease in the available talent pool of women as they move up the career ladder. In GCCs, at the senior level (9-12 years of experience), the representation stands at 15.7%, the report said.


India has nearly 1,600 GCCs. In 2022-23, GCCs added 2.8 lakh employees, taking its talent base to over 1.6 million. 
The report stated that family and caregiving responsibilities, limited access to career advancement and leadership opportunities, and poor work-life balance are some of the key factors influencing women’s attrition.


“While India proudly leads in the number of women STEM graduates globally, their under-representation in the deep tech workforce stems from systemic barriers hindering their education and career advancement. To unlock the full potential of our talent pool, we need to take a comprehensive approach, including strategic actions to increase the enrolment of women in leading technological institutions and retaining them in the workforce,” said Ajeya Motaganahalli, VP of engineering and MD, India R&D at Pure Storage.


The median representation of women graduates from top engineering universities stands at 25% between 2020-23, which directly affects the inflow of female candidates in GCCs, especially in the deep tech sector. Despite this disparity in women’s repre- sentation, women graduates consistently outperformed in securing placements compared to the overall average in top-tier universities.


“Advancement in any industry is stagnant without equity. While deep tech has pushed the boundaries of possibility, the sobering truth is that the sector has only 5.1% women at the executive level. Interventions to solve the talent pipeline issue and create work environments enabling women to thrive have become an urgent necessity. Initiatives like leadership development programmes, returnship opportunities, and flexible work arrangements introduced by GCCs are a positive start, but true progress demands unwavering commitment and consistency from the entire ecosystem,” said Karthik Padmanabhan, managing partner at tech advisory firm Zinnov.

See also

Global capability centres: India

Services sector: India

Multi-national corporations in India