For two decades, India’s Global Capability Centers, or GCCs, were understood in fairly narrow terms: back-office extensions of multinational pharmaceutical companies, useful for data entry, regulatory documentation, and routine safety monitoring, but rarely trusted with anything that touched the actual science. That framing no longer holds. Across Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Pune, GCCs run by companies such as Novartis, Pfizer, GSK, and AstraZeneca have quietly moved from executing instructions handed down from headquarters to making genuine decisions about how drugs are discovered, tested, and monitored once they reach patients. The shift is significant enough that industry analysts now describe India’s GCC ecosystem as handling a substantial share of global drug discovery support work and the majority of pharmacovigilance operations for several major multinationals.
The pharmacovigilance point deserves particular attention because it illustrates how far the mandate has expanded. Pharmacovigilance, the ongoing monitoring of a drug’s safety once it is in wide use, was traditionally treated as compliance work: log the adverse event, file the report, move to the next case. Indian GCCs increasingly do more than log; they analyze patterns across enormous case volumes, flag emerging safety signals before regulators formally request investigation, and feed that analysis back into how a company manages a drug’s lifecycle globally. That is not clerical work. It requires clinical judgment, statistical fluency, and regulatory literacy across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, and it explains why global pharmacovigilance leadership roles are increasingly based in India rather than merely staffed from India.
Hyderabad’s emergence as the anchor city for this shift is not accidental. The city already had a deep bench of pharmaceutical manufacturing talent thanks to its generics industry, along with a growing base of computational biology and bioinformatics graduates from local research institutions. Multinationals building out GCC operations found they could recruit scientists who understood both the regulatory grammar of global pharma and the computational tools now central to modern drug discovery, without having to import that combination of skills from Boston or Basel. The state government’s sustained investment in life-sciences infrastructure, including dedicated research parks and streamlined approvals for lab facilities, reinforced the city’s advantage rather than created it from nothing.
The functional areas where this shift is most visible extend well beyond pharmacovigilance. In drug discovery, Indian teams are now involved in target identification, the process of determining which biological mechanism a new drug should act on, and in the computational modeling that narrows thousands of candidate molecules down to a shortlist worth testing in the lab. In clinical operations, GCCs increasingly manage trial design decisions, not just trial administration, determining sample sizes, endpoints, and statistical approaches in consultation with, rather than dictation from, headquarters teams. Regulatory affairs teams in India now routinely prepare and defend submissions to the U.S. FDA and the European Medicines Agency directly, a role that would have been almost unthinkable a decade ago.
None of this is without friction. Multinational companies remain cautious about where final decision-making authority sits, and there is a persistent tension between the efficiency case for shifting more authority to India and the institutional habit of treating headquarters as the default locus of judgment. Compensation structures have not always kept pace with expanded responsibility either; a scientist in Hyderabad making a genuine R&D decision may still be compensated closer to a support-function benchmark than a headquarters-based counterpart doing comparable work, which creates retention risk precisely as these centers become more valuable. Attrition among senior GCC talent, once poached primarily by other GCCs, is now increasingly drawn toward India’s own homegrown biotech and pharma companies, which offer both scientific ownership and equity upside that GCC roles typically do not.
For India’s own pharmaceutical ambitions, the GCC story matters beyond the multinationals’ balance sheets. The scientific and regulatory expertise accumulating inside these centers does not stay contained within them; it moves, through job changes, consulting relationships, and informal knowledge transfer, into India’s domestic biotech and pharma sector. Executives who spent a decade running pharmacovigilance or clinical operations for a multinational GCC are now founding or advising Indian biotech startups, bringing with them exactly the regulatory sophistication that Indian companies have historically lacked when trying to break into regulated Western markets. In that sense, the GCC boom functions as an unplanned but highly effective training ground for India’s next generation of pharmaceutical entrepreneurs and executives.
The open question is whether multinationals will formalize what is already happening informally, by giving Indian GCCs explicit authority over discovery-stage decisions, global regulatory strategy, and safety governance, or whether they will continue to let responsibility expand ahead of official recognition. The companies that make that shift deliberately, aligning titles, compensation, and reporting lines with the actual decisions being made in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, are likely to retain the talent driving this transformation. Those that do not may find that the expertise they built in India walks out the door toward a domestic industry that is increasingly able to offer scientists what multinational GCCs still withhold: real ownership of the science.
– Sai Chaitanya Puligadda
