On a humid afternoon in Mohali, a glass building fills up before lunch.
Inside, young engineers scan dashboards tracking customer complaints from Ohio, fraud alerts from Frankfurt, and ad moderation queues from Jakarta. Outside, an auto rickshaw idles near a tea stall selling ₹20 chai. Nothing about the scene feels remarkable—until you realise that this is where a slice of the global economy is now quietly being run.
For decades, India’s Global Capability Centre (GCC) story has had a familiar geography. Bengaluru wrote the origin myth. Hyderabad scaled it. Pune professionalised it. Gurugram monetised it.
Chandigarh—along with its quieter cousins Mohali and Panchkula—was not supposed to be part of this story.
And yet, it is.
Without fanfare, without glossy “India’s Next Silicon Valley” campaigns, and without unicorn worship, the Chandigarh Tricity has become home to a growing number of GCCs—captive centres where global companies run engineering, analytics, finance, customer experience, and increasingly, AI-driven operations.
This is not a story of explosive growth. It is a story of something subtler, and possibly more durable: steady accumulation.
The GCCs That Were Never Meant to Be Here
The Tricity’s GCC footprint didn’t begin with startups or policy blitzes. It began, as many Indian tech stories do, with a large services firm quietly placing a bet.
Infosys opened its Chandigarh campus in 2006. Tech Mahindra followed in 2007. These were not experimental outposts—they were full-fledged campuses, designed for thousands of employees.
At the time, the rationale was simple:
- Access to engineering talent from Punjab University, PEC, and nearby institutions
- Lower attrition than tier-1 metros
- And a city designed for living, not just working
The result? Two campuses that still employ thousands today.
But after that initial wave, the Tricity slipped off the national radar. While Bengaluru attracted product teams and Hyderabad pulled in pharma and data centres, Chandigarh stayed… comfortable.
That comfort is precisely what made it attractive again—this time, to a very different kind of GCC.
From IT Campuses to Operational Nerve Centres
The newer GCCs arriving in the Tricity are not carbon copies of the old IT-services model.
Teleperformance’s Mohali campus, launched in 2022, is not just about voice support. It houses analytics teams, workforce management specialists, and digital CX operations. TaskUs’ “Oorja” campus focuses on trust & safety, AI training, and content moderation—functions that didn’t exist in the outsourcing vocabulary a decade ago.
Amazon’s Asia-Pacific JV chose Panchkula for a Hindi-language customer operations centre. eClerx expanded into Mohali for analytics and digital operations. Everise built CX capabilities that blend automation with human oversight.
The work has changed. The expectations have changed. And the Tricity has quietly adapted.
These GCCs are not here because Chandigarh is cheap. They are here because it is predictable.
Predictability Is Underrated
In an era of talent wars and attrition spikes, predictability has become a competitive advantage.
Executives running GCCs in the Tricity repeatedly cite the same reasons:
- Lower employee churn
- Stable real estate costs
- Fewer bidding wars for mid-level talent
- And a workforce less inclined to job-hop every 12 months
This is not a region where engineers expect ESOPs by default. Nor is it one where startups aggressively poach from GCCs. The labour market is calmer—and that calm translates into operational reliability.
For functions like customer experience, analytics, compliance, finance operations, and AI support, reliability matters more than hype.
Which is why the Tricity is not competing with Bengaluru. It is competing with Jaipur, Indore, Coimbatore, and Ahmedabad—and winning quietly.
Mohali’s Second Act
If Chandigarh provided the foundation, Mohali is where the story is now accelerating.
With newer IT parks, better land availability, and more state-level incentives, Mohali has become the default choice for expansion. Infosys’ multi-phase Mohali campus expansion is the most visible signal. Teleperformance, TaskUs, eClerx, and Everise have all chosen Mohali over the UT.
The logic is straightforward:
- More room to grow
- Slightly lower rentals
- Proximity to Chandigarh without its constraints
The result is a clustering effect. Once a few large employers move in, others follow—not because of branding, but because talent supply chains form naturally.
Mohali today feels less like a spillover zone and more like the Tricity’s operational core.
Panchkula: Smaller, But Strategic
Panchkula’s role is more limited, but not irrelevant.
Amazon’s choice to set up a contact centre here points to a specific use case: cost-efficient, language-specific operations that don’t require deep engineering talent pools. Panchkula offers cheaper rents and sufficient workforce availability for such functions.
It is unlikely to become a GCC hotspot in the traditional sense. But it serves as a release valve—absorbing roles that don’t need premium infrastructure.
In a distributed GCC model, that still matters.
The Work Is Getting Smarter
One of the more interesting shifts in the Tricity’s GCC ecosystem is the nature of roles being hired.
Job postings increasingly mention:
- Data analysis
- Cloud operations
- AI training and moderation
- Process automation
- Trust & safety operations
This is not frontier R&D. But it is no longer low-skill back-office work either.
The Tricity’s GCCs are evolving into execution hubs for global systems—places where complex workflows are monitored, corrected, optimised, and scaled.
In a world where AI handles the first layer of decision-making, these roles become more—not less—important.
Why This Matters More Than It Looks
At first glance, this may seem like a regional employment story. It is more than that.
GCCs act as anchors. Once established, they:
- Create steady, long-term employment
- Encourage housing and retail development
- Attract training institutes and ancillary services
- And slowly raise the skill floor of the local workforce
They don’t create unicorns. They create stability.
For a city like Chandigarh—designed around balance, not velocity—that stability fits unusually well.
The Policy Angle: Quiet, But Effective
Unlike some states, Punjab and Haryana have not marketed the Tricity aggressively as a GCC destination. And yet, incremental policy moves—IT park development, SEZ support, and targeted incentives—have made expansion easier.
The absence of hype may actually be working in the region’s favour. Companies expanding here are doing so for operational reasons, not incentives arbitrage.
That tends to stick.
The Risks of Staying Too Quiet
There is, however, a downside to invisibility.
Without deliberate ecosystem building:
- Smaller GCCs may struggle to hire specialised talent
- Senior leadership roles may remain concentrated in metros
- And the region could plateau as a “support hub” rather than evolve further
Cities don’t automatically upgrade their economic role. They have to choose to.
For the Tricity, that choice may involve:
- Encouraging deeper engineering and analytics work
- Partnering with universities on AI, fintech, and healthcare domains
- And investing in city-level infrastructure that supports scale
None of this requires a branding exercise. It requires coordination.
A Different Kind of Tech Story
Chandigarh’s GCC story won’t produce flashy headlines. There will be no sudden influx of venture capital. No founder worship. No breathless “next big thing” narratives.
Instead, there will be:
- More office floors filling quietly
- More graduates staying back instead of migrating
- More global workflows being run from unassuming buildings
This is how economic gravity actually shifts—not with noise, but with repetition.
The Tricity is not becoming a tech capital.
It is becoming something arguably more useful.
A place where the world’s systems quietly get things done.
And in an economy increasingly defined by reliability over romance, that might be exactly the right role to play.