Most market-entry conversations start with "we're thinking Bangalore," because it's the name every board has heard. It's a genuinely strong choice for a lot of companies, and a genuinely poor one for others. The right city depends on what kind of talent you need, what the office actually does, and what budget you're working with, not on which city is most familiar from the outside.
What actually matters
Strip away the reputation and four things do most of the work in a real site-selection decision: the depth and specialisation of the talent pool for your specific function, the real cost of real estate and salaries at the seniority level you're hiring for, how well-connected the city is for the travel your team will actually do, and whether there's an existing ecosystem of peer companies to recruit from and benchmark against. Quality of life for relocating expats and their families matters too, and shouldn't be an afterthought if the office will include people moving from abroad.
The eight cities, briefly
Bangalore remains India's deepest technology and GCC talent pool, with the ecosystem effect of hundreds of other tech companies and GCCs to match. It's also the most competitive and expensive market for that same talent, and traffic and real estate costs have both climbed accordingly.
Mumbai is the financial capital and the natural choice for banking, fintech, media, and anything that needs proximity to India's financial markets and international trade flows. Costs, particularly real estate, run high.
Delhi NCR (Gurgaon, Noida, and New Delhi) suits corporate headquarters functions, government-facing work, and anything that benefits from embassy and policy proximity, with a correspondingly broad, if more generalist, talent base.
Pune pairs a strong automotive and manufacturing base with a growing, often better quality-of-life IT sector, and tends to be more cost-competitive than Bangalore or Mumbai for comparable talent.
Chennai is a logistics and industrial hub with deep roots in automobile and engineering, a strong fit for manufacturing-adjacent and engineering functions specifically.
Hyderabad has built a genuinely large IT and pharmaceutical talent base and is now home to some of the biggest GCC campuses in the country, with costs still somewhat below Bangalore for comparable roles.
Kolkata is the commercial gateway to eastern India, with particular strength in BFSI and logistics, and meaningfully lower costs than the tier-one markets.
Kochi is an emerging tech and services hub with strong NRI ties and a lower cost base, worth a look for functions that don't require a tier-one metro's scale.
A worked example
A GCC standing up a core engineering team usually leans toward Bangalore or Hyderabad for depth of senior technical talent, accepting the higher cost as the price of speed to hire. A back-office or shared-services function doing high-volume, process-driven work is often better served by Pune, Chennai, or Kolkata, where the cost base is meaningfully lower and the talent pool for that kind of role is still strong. Neither answer is "better" in the abstract; they're right for different mandates.
How we approach it
We run site selection as a structured exercise, not a gut call: mapping your specific talent and functional needs against real, current cost and availability data in the cities under consideration, rather than defaulting to whichever city came up most in conversation. That's the starting point of our Business Setup & Site Selection work, and it feeds directly into everything that follows, from the lease to the hiring plan.