CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu is a significant player and a potential magnet for IT based talent-driven Global Capability Centres (GCCs) and the State is trying to capitalise on it by coming up with a Global Capability Centre Policy.
Official sources in the Information Technology Department said the State, with its talent base, can leverage this opportunity to improve its strategic capability, provide large white collar employment and move up the value chain. Tamil Nadu currently has around 130 to 140 such centres.
The GCCs, once used to be called captive centres, are the technology centres of foreign companies in India. The decision to off-shore these centres is primarily driven by low-cost but skilled manpower, scalability, language proficiency, availability of seamless connectivity, and infrastructure.
“GCCs today comprise over 25 per cent of the IT or Business Process (BP) management industry, growing faster than third-party providers. TN is the most attractive location for enterpise GCCs, given the talent availability at the intersection of industry domain and technology. It is for this reason that reputable global companies like Citigroup, Standard Chartered, and American Express in the 1990s; Ford and Caterpillar a decade later; and Barclays, PayPal and TransUnion in recent years made a beeline for Tamil Nadu,” said Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, former chairman and managing director, Cognizant India. He said a focused GCC policy will help in another hundred Global 1,000 companies to invest and scale in Tamil Nadu in the next three to five years.
KS Viswanathan, vice-president of industry initiatives at Nasscom, said a proactive policy framed by the State would help the establishment of GCC and their acceleration centre. Viswanathan said Nasscom is keen on working with the State government in coming out with the policy. He said the key goal for the policy should be three-fold. “The idea is to look beyond Chennai and focus on Tier-II and Tier-III cities. These could be Coimbatore, Madurai, Salem, or Tiruchy. The focus should be to generate employment and investments, and overall district transformation capabilities,” he said.
Currently, India has a 56 per cent market share in GCCs with revenue expected to touch around $35.9 billion. Ninety per cent of GCC headcount is based in Tier-1 and Tier-II cities, according to a Nasscom report. “There is no policy for GCC as of now. A policy at country-level and state-level will accelerate GCCs in the country. The centre is also thinking of a policy to attract more GCCs to the country. Similarly, Karnataka government is also working on a policy,” said Viswanathan.