Deloitte plans 50,000 hires in India, weighs Mangaluru for expansion

Deloitte plans to hire around 50,000 additional employees in India and is actively evaluating Mangaluru as a potential future expansion location, signalling the rising importance of Tier II cities in the country’s global capability centre ecosystem.

Romal Shetty, chief executive officer of Deloitte South Asia, said India continues to sit at the core of the firm’s global delivery and growth strategy. Speaking at TiEcon Mangaluru 2026 on January 17, Shetty said Deloitte currently employs about 140,000 people in India, accounting for nearly one-fourth of its global workforce.

Shetty said the firm intends to add roughly 50,000 more employees and confirmed that Mangaluru is under serious consideration as a future location, citing the city’s talent availability and long-term potential. He was in conversation with Rohit Bhat, president of TiEcon Mangaluru and founder of 99Games and Robosoft, during the event, as reported by People Matters.

Highlighting India’s role in the global GCC landscape, Shetty said the country hosts around half of all global GCCs, making it a dominant force both in scale and opportunity. While metropolitan hubs remain critical, he said future growth is increasingly expected to come from Tier II and Tier III cities, either through new centres or incremental expansion of existing operations.

Shetty said emerging cities offer a compelling mix of cost efficiencies, access to skilled talent and steadily improving infrastructure, prompting global firms to reassess their long-term location strategies.

Referring specifically to Mangaluru, Shetty said the city scores well on talent and real estate fundamentals, though infrastructure readiness would be a decisive factor in attracting large-scale technology and services operations. He also pointed to challenges around energy and water availability, particularly for data centres and high-compute facilities, which are becoming central to modern GCCs.

Shetty said India must significantly reduce the time required to set up GCCs, noting that while the process currently takes up to six months, it should ideally be completed within two weeks. He stressed the need for plug-and-play infrastructure and more streamlined regulatory processes to enable faster execution.

He further proposed the creation of digital economic zones that bring together GCCs, GPU-based data centres, startups and academic institutions within a single integrated ecosystem, supported by ready infrastructure and coordinated policy frameworks.

Drawing parallels with innovation ecosystems in the United States, Shetty said closer collaboration between universities, corporates and government would be critical to building sustainable innovation hubs in India. He also emphasised the importance of increasing investment in research and development and said India’s growth story would remain incomplete unless more than 200 cities achieve sustained economic prosperity.