India Desk
Your own team in India: engineering, technical, design, finance or back office, employed by your entity and working to your standards.
We handle the entity, the location, the hiring, the employment framework and the day to day management until the team can be run from your side.
Europe is short of engineers and India is not. Multinationals have been solving this with capability centres for two decades. What stops a mid sized company doing the same is not talent and not cost, it is that they have no entity, no HR function and nobody in India to manage anyone.
That is precisely the gap we fill.
The problem
A vendor delivers what was specified. Your own team learns your product, argues with you about it, and is still there in three years. Those are different things, and the second is usually what was actually wanted.
The vendor model works for defined, separable work. It works badly for anything requiring deep product knowledge, because the knowledge leaves when the contract ends or the vendor rotates the staff.
The cost comparison is also less favourable than it looks once vendor margin, ramp up time and the management overhead of the relationship are counted.
The reason mid sized companies still outsource is that building a team looks harder. It is harder in the first six months, and considerably easier for the following ten years.
What makes it work is treating the India team as part of the company rather than as a resource pool: the same tools, the same standards, real ownership of a product area, and a manager who is genuinely accountable rather than a coordinator.
What we build
Taken as far as you want. Some clients hand the whole thing back after eighteen months, others keep us running the local employment and administration indefinitely.
Which city, which employment model, and whether to build directly or start with a build operate transfer arrangement. The honest comparison, including when outsourcing is the better answer.
Incorporation through Onesto Legal, employment contracts, invention and confidentiality assignment, policies and the statutory registrations a team triggers.
The team lead first, then the team with the lead involved in selecting it. Hiring twenty people to a specification nobody has tested is the most common way this fails.
Office space or managed workspace, equipment, connectivity, and the information security arrangements your parent company and your customers will ask about.
Local management of the team while it is being established, so your European leads are managing work rather than administration and time zones.
A defined transfer to your own management, with the local employment, payroll and compliance either handed over or left with us, whichever you prefer.
How it runs
A first team of eight to fifteen people is realistic within twelve months, with the first hires productive from around month four.
What the team is for, what it will own, how it connects to your European organisation, and what it costs fully loaded rather than by salary alone.
Entity, employment framework, premises and the security and tooling standards agreed with your side before anyone is hired.
The lead, then the first engineers, with your team involved in the technical assessment rather than receiving a finished shortlist.
The team grows, takes ownership of a defined area, and joins your rituals and tooling rather than working to a brief.
Management moves to your side. We keep whatever administrative layer you want us to keep, and step out of the rest.
Common questions
General guidance rather than advice on a particular matter. Requirements and timelines change, and sector rules vary.
Below about five people the overhead of an entity, premises and compliance is hard to justify, and a vendor or an employer of record arrangement is usually better.
Between five and fifteen is where building your own starts to win clearly, and it keeps winning from there.
It depends on the discipline. Bangalore and Hyderabad have the deepest software and engineering pools and the most competition for them. Pune and Chennai are strong for mechanical, automotive and manufacturing engineering. Delhi and the surrounding region suits business services, finance and back office.
Cost and attrition both track the depth of the local market, so the cheapest city is rarely the cheapest answer.
It is real and it is highest in the largest technology markets. The things that actually reduce it are ownership of meaningful work, a competent local manager, a visible connection to the parent company, and a career path that does not require leaving.
Salary alone does not fix it, and companies that treat the India team as a cost centre experience the worst of it.
Through the employment contracts, with proper invention assignment and confidentiality drafted under Indian law, through access control and information security arrangements, and by registering the intellectual property that should be registered.
Onesto Legal handles all three, and the enforcement position in India is considerably better than most European companies assume.
An arrangement where we build and run the team, initially through our own structure, and transfer it to you at an agreed point. It defers the entity decision and reduces the initial commitment.
It costs more over the full period than building directly, so it suits companies testing the model rather than those already committed to it.
India sits three and a half to four and a half hours ahead of Western Europe depending on the season, which leaves a substantial overlapping working day. It is one of the reasons India suits European companies better than it suits American ones.
Related
Finding the lead and the team, assessed properly.
Read more →The employment framework, policies and payroll behind the team.
Read more →The entity that will employ them.
Read more →Making a distributed team actually work across two cultures.
Read more →Write to us
The discipline, roughly how many people, and how it would connect to your European organisation. We will come back with the honest cost, the realistic timeline, and whether building is actually better than the alternative for you.
We answer from New Delhi and from Bilbao, so European clients are not waiting a day for a reply.
Onesto Management Consultancy
New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Bilbao