An iCresset Insight | Pharma & Life Sciences | Talent Strategy | July 2026
India’s pharmaceutical companies are facing a talent threat that did not exist a decade ago and most are still responding to it with tools designed for a different era.
Global Capability Centres (GCCs) of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies have arrived in India at scale. They are not just hiring junior scientific staff. They are systematically extracting mid-senior and senior leaders like regulatory affairs specialists, pharmacovigilance heads, clinical operations leaders, data science experts from exactly the talent pool that Indian pharma companies, domestic generics majors, and CDMOs depend on. And they are doing it with advantages that traditional retention strategies cannot easily counter.
The Scale of the Threat
Of the top 50 global life sciences companies, around 23 have established GCCs in India (EY India, 2025). The names are significant: AstraZeneca has designated India as its largest global GCC with an AI drug discovery mandate. Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Hyderabad GCC employs over 3,000 professionals. Eli Lilly nearly doubled its India headcount in a single year (Gladwin International, 2025). Roche opened a 200,000 sq ft Digital Centre of Excellence in Pune in January 2024.
Healthcare and life sciences is now the fastest-growing GCC hiring category in India, overtaking several traditional sectors with clinical data, regulatory affairs, and drug discovery AI roles leading the surge (GCC Index, 2026).
GCCs offer 20–40% salary premiums over traditional pharma roles. Global opportunities, stock-linked compensation, and hybrid work policies are creating serious retention challenges, particularly at the mid-senior level. In pharmacovigilance specifically, one of India’s largest and most specialised pharma talent pools industry estimates suggest annual attrition rates of 25–35% in high-volume PV operations centres, driven by shift fatigue, competitive GCC offers, and limited perceived career progression.
The compensation gap has structural backing. GCCs are expected to lead salary growth, reaching 10.4% in 2026 compared to 10.2% in 2025, while pharma companies will hand out salary hikes of 9.7% widening an already significant gap year on year.
What GCCs Are Offering That Traditional Pharma Companies Are Not
To respond effectively, companies must first understand precisely what they are competing against. It is not just compensation.
- Global career pathways. A regulatory affairs professional working in a domestic pharma company manages India-specific submissions. The same professional in a pharma GCC may be managing FDA, EMA, and PMDA submissions simultaneously building a global regulatory CV that multiplies their market value within three years. The career trajectory is simply steeper, faster, and more internationally credible.
- Work model flexibility. GCCs, particularly post-2020, have institutionalised hybrid working in ways that many Indian pharma manufacturing and commercial organisations have not. For scientific and regulatory functions roles that do not require physical plant presence the inability to offer flexibility is an active retention liability, not a neutral factor.
- Brand and purpose signal. Working at an AstraZeneca or Roche GCC carries a global brand association that working at an Indian generics company does not. For ambitious professionals in the 30–45 age band those building the middle and upper-middle layers of the pharma talent pipeline this matters more than most CHROs acknowledge.
- Niche skills at a premium. Niche skills are commanding 1.7x higher salary hikes in the GCC market, with lateral moves in AI/ML and regulatory technology outpacing traditional vertical promotions. Professionals with expertise in pharmacovigilance signal detection, biostatistics, digital health, and AI-enabled drug discovery are not just in demand, they are in a structurally different compensation band.
The Roles Most at Risk
Not all pharma talent is equally vulnerable. The highest-risk profiles share a common characteristic: they sit at the intersection of scientific depth and digital fluency, which is precisely what GCCs are mandated to build.
- Regulatory Affairs leaders with multi-jurisdiction filing experience are among the most aggressively targeted. A regulatory specialist trained at a pharma GCC to navigate FDA submissions becomes extraordinarily attractive to Indian pharma companies, consulting firms, or rival GCCs offering 40% premiums. The reverse flow, Indian pharma companies losing these professionals to GCCs is equally intense.
- Pharmacovigilance mid-senior professionals (3–10 years experience) are in constant motion. Mid-level PV professionals, particularly associates with 3–6 years of experience, are simultaneously the most in-demand and most mobile cohort in the market. They receive frequent unsolicited approaches from GCCs, CROs, and competing pharma companies. Compensation expectations are rising faster than most organisations’ salary bands are moving, creating a structural offer-stage dropout problem.
- Data Science and Biostatistics professionals are being pulled simultaneously by GCCs, technology companies, and consulting firms, none of which need the person to have a pharma background. The competition here extends well beyond the sector.
- Clinical Operations and Medical Affairs leaders with global trial or publication experience are increasingly visible on GCC talent maps and increasingly receptive to approaches once they recognise the career ceiling within their current organisations.
What Most Traditional Pharma Companies Are Doing Wrong
The most common response from Indian pharma companies facing GCC-driven attrition is reactive: counter-offers when someone resigns, marginal salary adjustments, and occasional retention bonuses. None of these address the structural reasons talent moves.
Employee costs in Indian GCCs have risen to 76.2% of total costs, up from 65.9% in 2020, and average employee salaries are projected to increase by 9.9% in 2025. Matching GCC compensation without a matching value proposition is not a sustainable strategy the cost base becomes untenable without the global revenue model that GCCs operate within.
The deeper problem is career architecture. A talented regulatory professional at a domestic pharma company can see, with reasonable clarity, what the next ten years of their career looks like and it rarely includes managing global filings, working with international leadership teams, or building the scientific profile that a GCC role creates. Until domestic pharma companies address this, not with words in an annual appraisal conversation but with genuinely different role structures, international exposure pathways, and cross-functional development, the structural pull of GCCs will not abate.
What Companies Must Do Differently
1. Restructure the career architecture, not just the compensation. The most effective retention lever for high-value pharma professionals is not a larger number on a salary slip, it is a credible answer to the question: where does this role take me in three years? Companies that create international project exposure, cross-functional rotation, and genuine leadership pathways retain talent that counter-offers alone cannot hold.
2. Benchmark compensation against GCCs, not against domestic pharma peers. Salary benchmarking for regulatory, pharmacovigilance, clinical, and data science roles must account for GCC compensation as the competing reference point, not just what other domestic generics or formulations companies are paying. The talent does not think in sector silos; the benchmarking process must not either.
3. Build talent pipelines rather than reacting to vacancies. The average time-to-hire for senior pharma roles is now 90–120 days, a bottleneck that directly impacts plant commissioning timelines and product launches. Companies that maintain pre-built pipelines in regulatory affairs, pharmacovigilance, and clinical operations with warm relationships with passive candidates are fundamentally better positioned than those starting from zero when a seat goes vacant.
4. Identify and protect your flight-risk leadership tier proactively. Talent mapping of your own internal landscape understanding who in your regulatory, medical affairs, and clinical operations functions is most vulnerable to GCC approaches, based on profile visibility, career stage, and compensation position is the starting point for a targeted retention strategy. Waiting for a resignation letter is the most expensive form of workforce planning.
5. Invest in the employer brand for scientific talent specifically. GCCs have strong global brand equity with scientific professionals. Domestic pharma companies have mission equity, the ability to articulate meaningful contribution to India’s healthcare access, to patients at scale, and to the global generic supply chain that GCCs cannot replicate. This story is underused. Companies that tell it credibly and consistently, to the right audience, hold a genuine differentiation that money cannot manufacture.