India’s Emerging Tech Cities: Where the Next Talent Wave Is Coming From

COVER STORY | TALENT & INNOVATION

Bengaluru and Hyderabad built the first chapter of India’s GCC story. The next chapter is being written in cities; most global enterprises are only now beginning to take seriously. The talent is already there. The question is whether companies are paying attention.

India now hosts over 1,800 Global Capability Centres, nearly half of the world’s total, and the ecosystem is projected to cross 2,200 centres by 2030 contributing more than $100 billion to the global economy. Most of that headline gets attached to Bengaluru, which holds somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of all GCC activity in the country, or to Hyderabad, Pune, and the NCR corridor. These cities-built India’s reputation as the world’s capability partner of choice, and they deserve that credit.

But quiet rebalancing is underway. Forty percent of GCCs are now actively diversifying their hiring into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities because the saturated metro talent markets are driving costs and driving out the people they have already trained. The next wave of Indian tech talent is not waiting in Bengaluru. It is in Ahmedabad, Indore, Jaipur, Vadodara, and a handful of other cities that have been building their academic and professional infrastructure for years without much fanfare. The talent pipeline is deep. The question most enterprises are only now asking is: why did we take so long to look here?

The Metro Ceiling

There is a version of the India GCC story that looks impressive on a dashboard but tells a harder truth on the ground. Annual attrition in India’s major tech metros has hovered between 20 and 25 percent in recent years. Trained professionals, sometimes with two or three years of institutional context built inside a single organisation, leave for the next offer before they have had a chance to compound. The war for talent in cities like Bengaluru and Hyderabad is not just expensive in terms of salary benchmarks. It is expensive in terms of everything that walks out the door with every resignation.

The structural reason for this is straightforward. When a city has 35 to 40 percent of the country’s GCC activity concentrated within its boundaries, every professional in that city is permanently visible to every competitor. The LinkedIn message does not stop. The counteroffer always comes. Building deep institutional capability in that environment is genuinely difficult, and the companies that have tried longest knowing it best.

“The metros gave India’s GCC story its first chapter, and that chapter is remarkable. But the companies asking us about the next chapter are not asking about Bengaluru. They are asking about Ahmedabad, Jaipur, and Indore. They have done the retention math, and it points clearly in one direction.”

-- Umesh Uttamchandani, Managing Director, DevX

Where the Talent Actually Is

The assumption that Tier 2 cities lack qualified talent has always been weaker than it sounds. Gujarat alone hosts a technology and finance talent pool built on the back of IIT Gandhinagar, IIM Ahmedabad, DA-IICT, Ahmedabad University, and dozens of engineering institutions across Ahmedabad and Vadodara. The state is home to over 86,000 software engineers, 71,000 finance professionals, and 21,000 management specialists. Ahmedabad has recorded a 142 percent rise in AI-skilled professionals over recent years.

Indore, consistently ranked among India’s most liveable cities, has built a quiet reputation as an IT services hub with a steady graduate pipeline and a workforce that, by every available measure, stays longer than its metro counterparts. Jaipur is gaining ground as an IT and software development location, with government-backed incentives reinforcing private sector interest. Vadodara, long anchored in engineering and manufacturing, is expanding into tech services as global firms recognise that its talent base has depth well beyond the industrial sector.

Then there is GIFT City in Gandhinagar, a category of its own. India’s first operational greenfield smart city and international financial services centre now houses over 1,000 registered entities including global banks, fintech firms, capital market intermediaries, and insurance companies. More than 25,000 professionals work within its boundaries today, with projections pointing to 150,000 in the years ahead. GIFT City is not emerging. It has emerged. And it is drawing a very specific kind of talent: cross-functional professionals who can hold financial acumen and technology capability in the same hand.

“GIFT City is genuinely unlike anything else in India’s commercial landscape. It is a purpose-built global financial hub, and the talent it is attracting and developing has a different profile to what you find in a conventional tech corridor. When we set up a workspace in GIFT City, we are building for professionals who are operating at the intersection of global finance and emerging technology. That requires a different kind of environment.”

-- Parth Shah, Chairman, DevX

Infrastructure That Follows the Talent

One of the legitimate early objections to Tier 2 GCC expansion was infrastructure. Not talent, but connectivity, workspace quality, and operational readiness. That objection has been significantly eroded. EY research shows that two of India’s top five cities in mobility infrastructure are Tier 2 cities, with Jaipur ranking among them. Five of the top ten cities in the government’s Ease of Living Index are Tier 2, including Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Indore, and Coimbatore. State governments across Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh have introduced dedicated GCC policies offering capital subsidies, stamp duty waivers, and single-window clearance systems to make expansion practical rather than aspirational.

The workspace infrastructure has followed the same trajectory. DevX, which operates over 1.5 million square feet of premium managed space across 12 cities including Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Indore, Vadodara, and GIFT City, has been building enterprise-grade offices in these markets since long before the current wave of corporate interest. For a global enterprise evaluating a Tier 2 location, the question of operational readiness has a cleaner answer than it did even three years ago.

“We made a deliberate early bet on Tier 2 cities because we could see what the data was going to say before it became consensus. Now global companies are arriving in Ahmedabad and Indore and finding DevX already there with workspaces that match their standards. Through DevX GCC, we have helped enterprises go from decision to operational office in under 60 days in these markets. The infrastructure question has been answered.”

-- Rushit Shah, Co-founder, DevX

Retention as the Real Return on Investment

The financial case for Tier 2 expansion is well established. Office lease rentals run 40 to 60 percent lower than in prime metro locations. Salary benchmarks are more competitive. Operational costs compress significantly. But the more durable argument is the one about retention, because attrition in Tier 2 markets runs 8 to 12 percentage points below the major metros, and the compounding effect of that difference is substantial.

A professional who stays for three or four years carries something no AI tool can replicate: institutional context. They know which client relationships are delicate, how internal processes evolved, what was tried and failed, who needs to be in the room before a decision moves forward. When GCCs in Tier 2 cities keep their people longer, they are not just saving replacement costs. They are building something qualitatively different: teams that get better over time rather than perpetually restarting.

“The talent wave coming out of India’s emerging cities is not a second-best option. These professionals are choosing their cities with intention. They want careers with depth, workspaces that treat them well, and a quality of life that a Bengaluru salary cannot compensate for. At DevX, we design our Tier 2 spaces with that choice in mind. When the space honours the decision, a professional has made about where to build their life, the loyalty that follows is genuine.”

-- Yash Shah, Director, DevX

India’s next talent wave is not a future event. It is a present reality in cities that have been quietly developing the academic depth, professional base, and quality-of-life infrastructure needed to support serious enterprise operations. The companies arriving in these cities now will find something that their peers in the saturated metros have been struggling to hold onto: people who are genuinely willing to stay.

Since 2017, DevX has been building in these cities not as a hedge, but as a conviction. Across 12 cities, through DevX Design and Build and DevX GCC, with 1.5 million square feet of workspace designed around the people inside it, the infrastructure for India’s next chapter of talent-led growth is not on a roadmap. It is already standing.

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