Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman: Not just host GCCs; maximise innovation, accelerate discovery

3 min readNew DelhiJul 10, 2026 01:03 AM IST

The next phase of GCC growth cannot remain confined to a handful of metropolitan centres, the FM said. (Express Photo)

Moving beyond minimising cost to maximising innovation, accelerating discovery and strengthening long-term competitiveness should define the ambition for the enterprises for the next decade, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Thursday.

The ambition for the next decade should not simply be to host Global Capability Centres (GCCs), but “to ensure that an increasing share of the world’s ideas, parents, products, algorithms, platforms and enterprise capabilities are conceived, engineered and led from India”, she said.

“Global enterprises no longer choose countries merely based on costs or incentives. It is ecosystems, not incentives alone, that determine long-term competitiveness,” Sitharaman said at the inaugural GCC summit organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

In her message to the industry leaders, Sitharaman urged them to continue moving decisively up the value chain by creating intellectual property, leading frontier research, and developing AI applications, own product architecture to drive global innovation.

She asked industry to deepen its engagement with knowledge institutions through stronger partnerships with universities, start-ups, and centres of excellence to ensure that innovation moves seamlessly from laboratories to markets.

As Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities are rapidly developing the talent, infrastructure and innovation capacity required for globally competitive enterprises, Sitharaman said the industry should look at expanding into the emerging cities.

“I encourage industry to engage proactively with state governments, city administrations, educational institutions and local communities to build that awareness and help prepare these cities for the next wave of GCC investment,” she said, adding that industry should build partnerships with governments by sharing practical feedback on policy, processes, talent and infrastructure. Urging enterprises that have invested successfully in India to become ambassadors for India’s capabilities, she said their success stories are the “strongest endorsement of India’s GCC ecosystem”.

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The finance minister said the next phase of GCC growth cannot remain confined to a handful of metropolitan centres. “If the first 2,000 GCCs were concentrated in metropolitan centres, the next wave of India’s GCC growth will be geographically far more diverse. The geography of global value creation itself is changing. Tomorrow’s breakthrough in artificial intelligence, engineering design or product development could emerge as readily from Varanasi, Chandigarh, Visakhapatnam, Tiruchirappalli or Mysuru as from Bengaluru, Hyderabad or Gurugram.”

“These cities are offering competitive operating costs, and they are also rapidly developing a mature innovation base, emerging as powerful centres of innovation,” she said.

The establishment of a GCC in one of these cities has a multiplier impact, Sitharaman said. “It creates demand for advanced skills and specialised training. It supports start-ups, professional services, housing, urban infrastructure and research collaborations. It also encourages stronger partnerships between universities, industry and local institutions, helping cities evolve into vibrant innovation ecosystems. In doing so, GCCs become catalysts for balanced regional development,” she said.

The minister said states can develop specialised ecosystems aligned to their own abilities and needs as different states possess different competitive advantages, which will help make India’s overall innovation ecosystem more resilient, diversified and globally competitive.

Siddharth Upasani is a Deputy Associate Editor with The Indian Express. He reports primarily on data and the economy, looking for trends and changes in the former which paint a picture of the latter. Before The Indian Express, he worked at Moneycontrol and financial newswire Informist (previously called Cogencis). Outside of work, sports, fantasy football, and graphic novels keep him busy.

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