Fifteen multinational pharmaceutical companies run their most advanced research, data science, and clinical operations centres in India. Over 30,000 scientists and engineers. Six cities. The drugs that treat the world are increasingly designed here.
In 2016, Eli Lilly opened an office in Bengaluru with sixty-five people. They called it the Lilly Capability Centre India. By 2025, it had grown to 3,500, making it one of Lilly’s largest operations outside Indianapolis. Somewhere in the middle of that growth, someone built a room called “The Garage” — a prototyping lab where small teams could test ideas that had nothing to do with their job descriptions. The name was borrowed from the mythology of Silicon Valley, but the work happening inside it was pharmaceutical: faster ways to run clinical data management, machine learning models for adverse event detection, tools that shaved weeks off regulatory submissions. Forty-six per cent of the centre’s workforce are women. It has been certified a Great Place to Work.
This is not the story of offshoring. This is the story of what happens when the world’s largest drug companies discover that the talent they need to stay competitive has concentrated itself in half a dozen Indian cities, and they build permanent institutions around it.
When Novartis decided, over two decades ago, to build its largest corporate centre outside of Basel, it chose Hyderabad. Not London. Not Boston. Not Shanghai. Hyderabad. The Novartis Operations and Corporate Centre, known internally as NOCC, now employs approximately 8,000 people — making it the single largest Novartis site on the planet. It runs more than 100 clinical studies. It houses 350 scientists. It operates the NEST programme, through which 26,000 research teams from 5,500 institutions interact with Novartis’s drug development pipeline.
The decision to put this much institutional weight in India was not, at first, obvious. Novartis in the early 2000s was fighting India in court over patent protection for its leukaemia drug Glivec. The irony of simultaneously building the company’s largest global operations centre in the same country was noted at the time. What was not noted, because it became visible only gradually, was that the talent pool in Hyderabad for clinical operations, biostatistics, and regulatory science was deeper than anywhere else Novartis could find at comparable cost. The legal fight was about intellectual property rights. The operations centre was about human capital. Both were real.
Twenty years later, NOCC is no longer a cost play. It is where Novartis runs its Zero Leprosy initiative, manages a water-neutrality programme, and operates core functions that feed directly into the Basel-headquartered organisation’s drug approvals. The 8,000 people in Hyderabad are not back-office staff processing invoices. They are running the clinical trials that determine whether a molecule becomes a medicine.
The geography of pharmaceutical GCCs in India tells its own story. Hyderabad and Bengaluru dominate, but the map is widening. Chennai hosts AstraZeneca’s Global IT and Transformation Centre and Pfizer’s clinical operations. Pune runs MSD’s digital analytics hub. Mumbai anchors J&J’s drug product development sciences. Goa, improbably, houses Sanofi’s manufacturing science and technology centre, producing five billion tablets per year from a facility that most people associate with beaches rather than pharmaceutical manufacturing.
The clustering is not accidental. Hyderabad’s Genome Valley and HITEC City created a critical mass of life sciences and technology talent that feeds on itself. Bengaluru’s IT ecosystem, originally built by Infosys and Wipro, provided the data engineering and software talent that pharmaceutical companies increasingly need. When AstraZeneca opened its Global IT and Transformation Centre in Chennai in 2014, it was because Chennai offered a combination of regulatory expertise (the city’s proximity to major clinical research organisations) and lower attrition rates than Bengaluru. Today that centre accounts for 50 per cent of AstraZeneca’s global IT workforce: roughly 4,000 people, managing over 2,000 digital collaborations per year.
The phrase “Global Capability Centre” was invented, in part, to solve a branding problem. The previous name — “Global In-house Centre” — suggested something auxiliary, a support function bolted onto the real organisation. The rename reflected an operational reality that had overtaken the original mandate. These centres are no longer processing the paperwork of drug development. They are doing the drug development.
Bristol-Myers Squibb invested $100 million in July 2023 to expand its Hyderabad centre, which now employs more than 3,000 people. Its Bengaluru Biocon Research Centre, a collaboration that began in 2009, integrates directly into BMS’s global biologics pipeline. Amgen committed $200 million to its Hyderabad centre through 2025, building AI and data science capabilities around a 700-person operation. These are not the numbers of companies saving money on back-office functions. These are the numbers of companies repositioning their R&D infrastructure.
Merck KGaA now runs three separate GCCs in Bengaluru alone. The Healthcare R&D centre employs roughly 500. The Merck IT Centre has grown 240 per cent between 2018 and 2022, reaching 1,200 people. The Global Engineering and Services hub, established in 2023, adds another 1,000. Total headcount across the three: approximately 2,700 people in a single city, for a single company. When your Bengaluru operation is 2,700 people and growing, you are not outsourcing. You are building a second headquarters.
The most recent wave of GCC expansion is driven by artificial intelligence. Pfizer established what it describes as its first commercial AI analytics centre in India. Bayer’s Hyderabad centre runs a dedicated Data Science Analytics and AI function. MSD opened a digital analytics hub in Pune in 2022, followed by a Global Tech Centre in Hyderabad in early 2025. Novo Nordisk’s Bengaluru GBS — which has operated since 2007, though the company’s India presence dates to 1992 — now manages 37 ongoing clinical trials with over 3,000 patients, and has signed MoUs with MAHE, BITS Pilani, and the IITs to build its talent pipeline for AI-driven research.
The convergence is logical. India produces more AI and machine learning engineers per year than any country except the United States and China. The pharmaceutical companies that built GCCs in India for clinical data management in the 2000s, for IT services in the 2010s, now have physical infrastructure, institutional relationships, and organisational muscle in exactly the cities where AI talent is concentrated. The pivot from data processing to data science required surprisingly little physical relocation. It required hiring different people into the same buildings.
Roche’s India operation illustrates the pattern. The company spent CHF 13 billion on R&D globally in 2024. Its Indian centres in Chennai, Pune, and Hyderabad operate as a 100 per cent healthcare-focused Digital Centre of Excellence. The “Blue Tree” patient support programme, run from India, has reached over 25,000 patients. An Outsourced Development Centre with ZS Associates handles analytics that feed directly into Roche’s commercial decision-making. None of this existed fifteen years ago.
J&J’s Global Development centre in Hyderabad, which started in July 2022, connects to a company that employs 13,000 R&D scientists worldwide and runs more than 700 active clinical trials. The Hyderabad centre is the hub; Mumbai hosts the Drug Product Development Sciences team within what J&J internally calls HIGI. The speed of the buildout is notable: from zero to over 500 people in under three years.
Pfizer’s clinical footprint in India is distributed across three cities. An R&D centre at IIT Madras with 250 people. A commercial AI analytics team and a medical affairs group in Mumbai totalling 160. A clinical operations unit in Chennai with over 600 people across multiple functions. Thirty-five clinical trials run from India for a company with 573 products in its global portfolio. It is one of twelve Pfizer R&D centres worldwide.
Bayer, with 127 years of presence in India, runs its GCC from Hyderabad and Bengaluru with approximately 800 people. Since establishing its Global Business Services in 2005, the operation has expanded into clinical development, running 20 clinical projects from India. GSK’s R&D presence in India dates to 1996, though the formal GCC was established only in 2021. The Bengaluru-headquartered centre, with extensions in Hyderabad and Mumbai, now employs more than 2,500 people — including 1,400 in R&D alone. It won NASSCOM’s “Building Talent of Future” award.
Sanofi has been in India since 1956. Its current workforce of 3,645 employees spans the full pharmaceutical value chain, but two locations tell the story of its GCC evolution. In Goa, a manufacturing science and technology centre of roughly 60 specialists oversees production of five billion tablets per year. The scale of that number is worth pausing on: five billion tablets, from a facility in a state better known for tourism than industry, feeding Sanofi’s global supply chain.
In Hyderabad, approximately 2,200 people work in what Sanofi internally calls the “House of Dreams.” The name is not ironic. The centre was ranked among the Top 24 GCCs in India in 2024, and it runs functions that span digital, data, and business services for Sanofi’s global operations. Combined, Sanofi’s Indian GCC operations represent roughly 2,260 people dedicated to capabilities that did not exist in India two decades ago.
The aggregate picture is striking. Fifteen multinational pharmaceutical companies — representing a combined global revenue exceeding $500 billion — have built permanent, growing, increasingly strategic operations centres in India. The combined headcount across these centres exceeds 30,000 people. They are not answering phones. They are designing clinical trials, building AI models, running regulatory submissions, managing global supply chains, and producing billions of doses of medicine.
The shift happened gradually enough that it is easy to miss. In the 2000s, these were cost-saving IT shops. In the 2010s, they added clinical operations and data management. In the 2020s, they became AI and digital hubs. The trajectory is clear: each generation of GCC takes on work that is closer to the core of what a pharmaceutical company does. The question is no longer whether India’s GCCs are strategically important. It is whether the companies that have not yet built them can afford to wait.
When Eli Lilly opened that sixty-five-person office in 2016, it was an experiment. When it became 3,500 people with “The Garage” and a Great Place to Work certification, it was an institution. That transformation — from experiment to institution — is the story of pharmaceutical GCCs in India. It has happened fifteen times. It is still happening.
Sources: OPPI Global Capability Centres 2025 Report. Company annual reports and GCC publications. NASSCOM GCC India landscape data.