India’s One Nation, One Time Push Forces GCCs to Rethink 24/7 Operations
By Shalini Mondal ·
India’s move towards standardising Indian Standard Time (IST) could prompt global capability centres (GCCs) to reassess how they manage technology infrastructure, global collaboration, and time-zone-dependent operating models, even as experts say the change is unlikely to materially alter employees’ working hours.
Recently, the Centre notified the Legal Metrology (Indian Standard Time) Rules, 2026, designating IST as the single reference time for all legal, administrative, commercial, and official purposes across the country.
For GCC leaders, this changes both infrastructure and organisational priorities.
The bigger shift may come from how India’s GCCs use time as they take on increasingly complex responsibilities spanning R&D, product engineering, AI, analytics, and strategic decision-making. Experts argue that the long-standing “follow-the-sun” model will continue in operational functions but may evolve for higher-value work.
From Clock Hours To Business Value
The follow-the-sun model—where tasks, support tickets, and development projects are handed off between geographically distributed teams—remains useful for operations and support. and time-sensitive work. For innovation and decision-making, however, moving work between time zones can create friction. Complex R&D and strategic decisions often require people to work together in real time rather than rely on a series of handovers.
Rohitashwa Aggarwal, Partner at Everest Group, tells AIM that standardising IST would not change how GCCs operate day-to-day, but could provide an opportunity to reconsider how time is used.
“India’s time-zone position has long allowed businesses to extend their working day. In the future, however, the greater advantage will come from having the right talent working on the right problems at the right time. The next generation of GCCs will compete less on the number of hours they cover and more on how effectively they coordinate talent, technology, and decision-making across the business,” he adds.
The distinction is becoming important as Indian GCCs assume greater ownership of global products and business functions.
AI Reshapes the GCC Talent Pyramid
Aggarwal believes overreliance on time-zone coverage can result in repeated handovers and fragmented accountability.
AI is likely to accelerate this imbalance in the growing GCC workforce. According to Zinnov, the GCC workforce in India has grown by approximately 33% over the past three years.
Alouk Kumar, CEO and Managing Director of Inductus Group, notes that the shift requires GCCs to rethink the historical emphasis on scale, cost efficiency, and extended operating hours.
“Historically, India’s advantage was closely associated with scale, cost efficiency, and the ability to provide extended coverage to global organisations. The ‘follow-the-sun’ model was a natural extension of this, allowing work to move across geographies and ensuring continuity of operations. However, as Indian GCCs increasingly take ownership of R&D, product engineering, innovation, analytics and strategic decision-making, simply optimising for time-zone coverage is no longer sufficient,” he explains.
Kumar believes that the focus should move from hours of operation to business outcomes.
“For routine and operational activities, follow-the-sun will continue to have relevance, but for complex knowledge work, constant handovers can create friction and dilute ownership. The emerging model is likely to be one where expertise follows the problem, with global centres of excellence taking greater end-to-end ownership irrespective of geography or time zone,” he adds.
The Bigger Impact Could Be Machine Time
Sukanya Roy, Partner and Head of India GCC Business at Zinnov, however, states the immediate implications of IST standardisation are more technical than operational. She distinguishes between people time and machine time, arguing that GCCs may see greater impact in the latter.
“India’s move to standardise IST has very little impact on people's time. It does not change employee working hours, shift timings, or global collaboration. The more relevant impact is on machine time—how systems, transactions, logs, networks, and digital infrastructure record and synchronise time,” Roy states.
For GCCs handling banking, payments, cybersecurity, telecom, data centres, energy, oil and gas, or industrial systems, accurate timestamps can be critical for transaction sequencing, reconciliation, audit trails, and incident analysis. Roy says such centres may need to review how their systems source, synchronise, and record time.
“That does not mean follow-the-sun is outdated. For areas such as customer support, cybersecurity, infrastructure monitoring and other 24x7 operations, it remains extremely valuable. But for innovation, product development and strategic decision-making, enterprises increasingly need a ‘work-with-the-sun’ model where teams across India and other markets have meaningful periods of overlap to collaborate, solve problems, and make decisions together,” she adds.
GCCs therefore face both technology and operational challenges, with systems needing to remain synchronised and traceable while organisations balance 24x7 coverage with collaboration windows and greater autonomy for India-based leaders.
Cloud and SaaS Systems
Forrester VP and Research Director Ashutosh Sharma highlights another technology consideration: GCC infrastructure in India will need to remain aligned with time servers provided by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research–National Physical Laboratory.
“The real challenge is, and it is still open to interpretation, how will the transactions performed by India-based employees on externally hosted infrastructure (like cloud or SaaS or even external data centre) be recorded,” Sharma ponders.
Sharma notes that most external systems use UTC, making a wholesale shift to India-based time servers impractical.
“Changing their clock to the one deriving time from India-based clock servers is not only impractical but impossible and unnecessary. In such cases, a mere translation to IST by UTC+5:30 should suffice the needs. It will still require some remediation but will be relatively simple,” he advises.
On the follow-the-sun model, Sharma says it will remain relevant for operational services, including managed business-process support, application development and maintenance, security, and infrastructure services. For R&D and application development, however, coordination responsibilities may increasingly shift towards senior leadership.
He adds that where product leadership has moved to India, or work is asynchronous, employees may no longer need to routinely work off-hours for coordination with headquarters.
“This is a slow change and will manifest in the longer term. For the foreseeable future, many of the GCCs will continue to have a follow-the-sun model for a number of the areas because they will continue to deliver on operational work even as they assume responsibility for higher-value R&D work,” he notes.
Overall, for India’s GCCs, routine and time-sensitive services may continue to depend on round-the-clock coverage, while innovation and strategic work increasingly prioritise expertise, real-time collaboration and decision-making.