You may already know about it. The Department of Labour and Employment, Government of J&K is working closely with IIM Jammu to organise a benchmark event, the J&K GCC Summit 2026, where 55 panelists interact with leading government officials and other stakeholders over two days to find out the optimal path to make J&K an emerging destination for GCCs.
But what are GCCs? The earlier BPOs were outsourced, but Global Capability Centres are fully owned in-house centres that companies build to centralise many core business operations, including technology, R&D, corporate processes (HR, payroll, you name it) and so on… And no, they are not data centres. While data centres are physical infrastructure based, GCCs are intrinsically human capital based – and that’s where the phenomenal story builds. GCCs hold the key to build employment in a way to current industry can. So should J&K promote GCCs? But before you ask that no-brainer question, perhaps you should ask, does J&K have the talent to support GCCs?
Well, ask what Jammu and Kashmir exports and most people will name apples, saffron, walnuts and handicrafts. The list leaves out the export that costs the Union Territory most: its graduates. Every year engineers, accountants, analysts and designers trained here take their first jobs in other States. They do well there. Their salaries are spent there too.
The figures explain the pattern. The Mission YUVA Baseline Survey 2024-25, drawing on the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2023-24, places youth unemployment in Jammu and Kashmir at 17.4 per cent against a national rate of 10.2 per cent. More than 3.6 lakh educated young people were registered with the Union Territory’s employment exchanges in September 2025. Talent is in surplus. Private employers of scale are in short supply.
The Global Capability Centre sector addresses that shortage directly. India’s GCC workforce is projected to grow by 84 per cent to about 3.46 million professionals by 2030. A growing share of it will be based outside the metropolitan clusters. The Mission YUVA baseline itself identified high-skilled, knowledge-sector enterprises as the route to better-paying jobs. Capability centres are among the largest employers of that kind in India.
The roles are more varied than is commonly assumed. Capability centres hire for finance and accounting operations, data analytics, software engineering, cybersecurity, human resources services, customer experience, legal process work and healthcare data management. Many of these roles are open to commerce, science and humanities graduates after focused training. The sector can therefore absorb a far wider section of our graduates than engineering alone would suggest.
Mission YUVA, the Yuva Udyami Vikas Abhiyan, is the J&K Government’s principal instrument for this work. It was conceived by the Government of Jammu and Kashmir in collaboration with IIM Jammu, NABARD, J&K Bank and other financial institutions. It aims to create 1.37 lakh enterprises and 4.25 lakh jobs over five years. By May 2026 it had received more than 1.07 lakh applications, sanctioned 25,000 cases and disbursed over ₹1,100 crore. The target for 2026-27 alone is 50,000 enterprises.
The Mission was built for entrepreneurship. Its machinery serves employment at scale equally well. Twenty district-level Small Business Development Units and 80 Business Help Desks give it a presence in every district. Its app and portal track outcomes enterprise by enterprise. The same infrastructure can match a capability centre’s hiring requirement to candidates, track their training and verify their placement.
There is a second link that is easy to miss. A centre of 500 people needs caterers, transport operators, facility managers, security services and IT support vendors. Each is an opening for a Mission YUVA enterprise. Every capability centre that comes to Jammu and Kashmir therefore creates two streams of opportunity: salaried jobs inside the building and local businesses around it.
But to make it happen, the Department of Labour and Employment, J&K Government is working on four lines of work with the sector.
First, training will start from a stated requirement. When an employer specifies the skills and numbers it needs, the Department will convene the universities, the Skill Development Department and the ITI network to deliver them against a fixed cohort size and date. The upgrade of ITIs under PM-SETU allows part of that network to prepare technicians for the IT infrastructure, network operations and facilities roles that surround every centre. The Department’s district employment and counselling centres will add guidance on capability centre careers, so that students choose courses with these roles in view.
Second, internships will be designed as recruitment, with a defined project, an assigned supervisor, a formal assessment and a stated expectation of conversion to employment.
Third, the Department will build a register of professionals from Jammu and Kashmir who now work in capability centres elsewhere in India and overseas. Many would consider returning if the work were here. They are the fastest route to the experienced managers a new location needs most.
Fourth, the sector offers the clearest route to formal employment for educated women who cannot relocate for work. Mission YUVA was built to address unemployment that weighs most heavily on young people and on women. Placement in capability centres will carry the same priority.
As the Administrative Secretary of the Department of Labour and Employment in J&K, I am presenting the Summit Report at the Valedictory Session of the J&K GCC Summit 2026 on 10 October. My request to every GCC investor and employer present is specific: tell us the roles, the numbers and the dates. The Department will build the pipeline to match. Success will look like a graduate in Anantnag or Rajouri who chooses a global career and stays home to pursue it.
The writer is Secretary, Labour and Employment Department, Government of Jammu and Kashmir.
