Over 2,000 filings: The compliance cost of India's GCC boom

New Delhi: India has emerged as the undisputed global hub for Global Capability Centres (GCCs), hosting over 55 per cent of such facilities worldwide, yet these innovation engines must navigate a staggering regulatory maze of more than 500 distinct legal obligations and over 2,000 annual filings across central, state, and local levels.

Team Lease RegTech, in a study titled 'GCCs in India: Cultivating Capability, Ensuring Compliance', noted that despite their rapid expansion and contribution of over $ 64.6 billion in export revenue, GCCs operate within one of the most extensive compliance frameworks governing any enterprise ecosystem. "The compliance requirements for a typical GCC establishment can be classified across seven categories. Each of these categories contains several laws, rules and regulations with varying degrees of applicability depending on the establishment's size, nature and operations. "A GCC registered under a Special Economic Zone in Karnataka with a 1,000-seating capacity needs to deal with 537 obligations. However, this figure inflates to 2,051 once we factor in the annual frequency of these obligations. This figure can go even higher given the nature of ongoing and event-based compliances that do not have a fixed frequency," the report stated.