Software development company in Gurgaon: 6 checks before you sign in 2026

Summary. Haryana gazetted its Global Capability Centres Policy on 27 May 2026, targeting 100 new GCCs and 30,000 jobs over five years, with capital expenditure reimbursement of 50 percent inside non-TOD Gurugram and 75 percent in other districts. That policy is now the single biggest influence on what a Gurgaon engineering team costs you, because it subsidises the buyers you compete with for the same people. Meanwhile two legal defaults have not moved: under section 17 of the Copyright Act 1957 the author is first owner of software, and under section 19(5) a silent assignment runs only five years. India's tech industry reached $282.6 billion in FY2025E on 5.1 percent growth, per Nasscom, across roughly 1,750 GCCs. Picking a vendor in that market is a diligence exercise first.

Most buyer guides for this decision compare portfolios and hourly rates. Those are the least decisive inputs. The things that actually go wrong on an India engagement are ownership of the deliverable, the identity of the entity you contracted with, and a compliance date nobody diarised. Each of the six checks below is answerable before the first invoice, and four of them are free.

Why Gurugram's engineering market changed on 27 May 2026

The Haryana Global Capability Centres Policy, 2026 runs five years from 27 May 2026. It applies to captive centres serving their own parent, group or affiliate entities, and it explicitly excludes units serving third-party clients. That distinction matters to you as a buyer: your outsourced vendor cannot claim these incentives, but the GCC hiring down the road can.

The numbers are large enough to move salaries. A qualifying centre in a non-TOD area of Gurugram recovers 50 percent of eligible capital expenditure, rising to 65 percent inside a Transit-Oriented Development zone and 75 percent in other Haryana districts. Operating expenditure support runs 50 percent for five years in non-TOD Gurugram and 65 percent for nine years elsewhere in the state. Employer provident fund contributions are reimbursed in full for five years, capped at ₹25,000 per employee per year. Employment subsidy reaches 120 percent of average gross monthly salary for ten years on qualifying local hires, and units commencing commercial operations on or after 1 January 2026 are eligible. Total incentives are capped at 100 percent of fixed capital investment.

Read that as a talent-cost signal. A subsidised captive centre can pay a senior engineer more than an unsubsidised services firm can, and it is doing so in the same three sectors of Gurugram. When a vendor quotes you a rate that looks well below the local market, the question is not whether they are efficient. It is which engineers that rate buys. We cover the incentive mechanics separately in our breakdown of the Haryana GCC policy 2026 incentives and eligibility.

Check 1: who owns the code when the contract is silent

This is the check almost nobody runs, and it is the one that costs the most when it fails.

Section 17 of the Copyright Act 1957 makes the author the first owner of a work. The proviso that transfers first ownership to the commissioning party is a closed list: "a photograph taken, or a painting or portrait drawn, or an engraving or a cinematograph film made, for valuable consideration at the instance of any person". Software is not in that list. There is no work-for-hire doctrine for commissioned code in India.

If your contract does contain an assignment but leaves the terms open, section 19 fills the gaps against you. Sub-section 19(4) deems an assignment lapsed if the assignee has not exercised the rights within one year. Sub-section 19(5) deems the period five years if none is stated. Sub-section 19(6) presumes the territorial extent is India only, which is an odd result for a product you intend to sell in the United States.

The Delhi High Court applied exactly this in Pine Labs v. Gemalto Terminals India, decided 3 August 2011 before A.K. Sikri, J. The clause in the master service agreement stated no period. The court held that "whatever be the nature of the MSA, the provisions contained in section 19(5) and (6) would inevitably be triggered". This was an interlocutory ruling on an injunction rather than a final decree, and later judgments read long-form agreements as a whole before applying the defaults. It is a gap-filler, not a guillotine. But it is a gap you can close in one sentence of drafting, so close it.

What to ask for: a written assignment that states the rights assigned, a perpetual term, worldwide territory, and moral-rights waiver where permissible. Do not accept "all IP vests in the client" as the entire clause.

Check 2: the subcontractor gap

A vendor can hold clean title to its employees' work and still be unable to give you clean title.

Section 17 clause (c) vests copyright in the employer for a work made "in the course of the author's employment under a contract of service". A contract of service is employment. An independent contractor works under a contract for service and falls outside clause (c) entirely. So if the vendor staffed part of your build with contractors on a monthly retainer, which is common at every size of Indian firm, that code needs a second written assignment from each contractor before the vendor can pass it to you.

Ask the question directly: what proportion of the team on our engagement is on your payroll, and do you hold executed assignments from everyone who is not? Then check the answer against provident fund records, which is Check 3.

Patents are a harder problem still. There is no employer-default vesting for patents in India at all, and section 3(k) of the Patents Act excludes computer programmes per se from patentability, so software teams rarely have a patent position to assign in the first place.

Check 3: verify the company before the pitch deck

Two government portals answer most identity questions for free, with no login and no paid data provider.

The GST taxpayer search returns legal name, trade name, effective date of registration, constitution of business, principal place of business and cancellation date if any. The official GST search taxpayer user manual confirms that "Details of Return Filed" are visible "without login into the GST Portal", behind a Show Filing Table control with a financial year selector. A vendor with gaps in its filing table is telling you something about its finance function. Annual aggregate turnover and e-way bill history need a login, so treat any claim about vendor revenue as unverified.

The EPFO establishment search is the stronger signal and the less used one. It returns establishment status, Form 5A details filed by the employer, payment details under validity status, and a section headed "Establishment/s with Same PAN". Provident fund remittances are a payroll proxy: an outfit claiming a 200-person bench with PF remittances for 15 people is a front for someone else's delivery team. The same-PAN listing is how you find the related entities the pitch deck omitted.

Check 4: where the DPDP Act actually lands

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 is frequently sold as an immediate obligation. The commencement notification says otherwise.

Gazette notification G.S.R. 843(E), dated 13 November 2025 and published by MeitY on 14 November 2025, brought sections 18 to 26 and the Data Protection Board provisions into force on publication. It set eighteen months from publication for sections 3 to 17, the substantive consent, notice, security and data-fiduciary duties. That lands in mid-May 2027. The notification states a period rather than a calendar date, which is why secondary write-ups disagree on whether it is 13 or 14 May.

The offshore carve-out is section 17(1)(d) of the DPDP Act: "personal data of Data Principals not within the territory of India is processed pursuant to any contract entered into with any person outside the territory of India by any person based in India". Read it precisely. It covers an Indian vendor processing foreign users' data under a foreign contract. It does nothing for a product aimed at Indian users, which is most of what gets built in Gurugram. If your application will hold Indian personal data, the mid-2027 obligations are yours, and the engineering work behind them takes longer than the drafting. Our DPDP Act engineering playbook for Indian startups sets out the build sequence.

Check 5: contracting after 1 April 2026

Contract templates written before this year are citing repealed law. The Income-tax Act 2025 came into force on 1 April 2026, replacing the Income-tax Act 1961, which the CBDT describes as "a comprehensive effort to simplify and modernise the country's income-tax law, replacing the six-decade-old Income-tax Act, 1961". Parliament passed the Bill on 12 August 2025, the President assented on 21 August 2025, and the Income-tax Rules 2026 were notified on 20 March 2026.

The practical effect on a services contract is narrow but real: withholding and business-connection clauses that cite 1961 Act section numbers now point at nothing. If a Gurgaon vendor hands you a master service agreement still referencing section 195, that template has not been reviewed in over a year, which tells you how current the rest of it is.

Check 6: engagement model and what it costs

We publish engagement models rather than a rate card, because a rate card without a scope is a number that misleads both sides. Three models cover almost every request that reaches us in Gurugram.

Fixed-scope delivery suits a defined build with a signed specification, typically an MVP or a migration with a known endpoint. Pricing is a band agreed against a written scope, with change control on anything outside it. Dedicated team suits product work where the roadmap will move: you fund a named senior-led squad by the month and set priorities sprint by sprint. Managed outcome suits maintenance and platform work measured against availability and response targets rather than headcount.

The choice matters more than the rate. A fixed-scope contract with a roadmap that changes weekly produces change requests, not savings. For a build with genuine unknowns, a dedicated offshore product engineering team costs less over twelve months than the same work bought as three consecutive fixed-scope phases. We publish indicative build ranges in our guide to app development cost in India.

One caution on daily control. Where a foreign buyer runs the daily standup and assigns individual tickets to named engineers at an Indian vendor's premises, the arrangement starts to look like operational control rather than a services purchase, which is a permanent-establishment question worth putting to your tax adviser before you design the working model.

What eCorpIT builds, and how

eCorpIT is eCorp Information Technologies Private Limited, founded in 2021, with its engineering office at Sector 83, Gurugram. We hold CMMI Level 5, ISO 27001:2022 and MSME certification, and we are partners of AWS, Microsoft, Google, Shopify and Kaspersky.

The work is custom software: web platforms, mobile applications, API and integration layers, data pipelines, and cloud migration. Typical briefs are a product build for a funded startup, a legacy modernisation for a mid-market manufacturer, or an integration layer joining an ERP to a customer-facing application.

Delivery runs in five steps. First, a scoping engagement that produces a written specification and an architecture decision record, not a proposal deck. Second, a fixed design and technical spike phase that resolves the highest-risk unknown before anyone commits to a timeline. Third, sprint delivery by a senior-led team with the client's product owner in the sprint review. Fourth, a hardening phase covering performance, security review and data-protection design. Fifth, handover with runbooks, or a managed support arrangement if you prefer to keep us on.

The stack is chosen against the problem rather than a house preference: React, Next.js and Astro on the front end; Node.js, Python and Java on the server; PostgreSQL and MongoDB for data; React Native and Flutter for mobile; AWS, Azure and Google Cloud for infrastructure, with Terraform and containerised deployment. Where personal data is in scope we build to DPDP Act requirements; we do not claim certification under a framework we do not hold.

On IP, our contracts assign deliverables to the client with a stated perpetual term and worldwide territory, precisely because sections 19(4) to 19(6) would otherwise supply terms neither side intended. Related reading: custom software development company selection, our web development company in Gurgaon page for front-end and platform work, and the national view in software development company in India.

India-specific considerations

Gurugram's advantage over Bengaluru or Hyderabad for this kind of work is proximity rather than price: a client in Delhi NCR can be in the room for a sprint review, and the corporate and BFSI buyer base sits in the same corridor. The disadvantage is the same GCC competition the Haryana policy is designed to intensify. Sindhu Gangadharan, Chairperson of Nasscom, framed the wider shift as "the growing maturity of GCCs as value hubs are reshaping industry dynamics", which in hiring terms means the senior engineer you want has a subsidised alternative employer four kilometres away.

The market context is worth holding in mind when a quote looks unusually low. Per Nasscom's Strategic Review, the Indian technology industry reached $282.6 billion in FY2025E, growing 5.1 percent and adding $13.8 billion in incremental revenue, with IT services at $137.1 billion, engineering R&D at $55.7 billion, exports at $224.4 billion and headcount at 5.8 million after 126,000 net additions. That is a mature market with well-understood cost structures. A rate materially below it is buying you something other than the team you were shown.

FAQ

Does a Gurgaon software company automatically own the code it writes for me?

No. Under section 17 of the Copyright Act 1957 the author is first owner, and the commissioned-work proviso covers only photographs, paintings, portraits, engravings and films. Software is absent from that list. Without an express written assignment, the vendor keeps first ownership of the code you paid for.

What happens if the assignment clause does not state a term?

Section 19(5) of the Copyright Act deems the assignment to run five years, section 19(6) presumes it extends within India only, and section 19(4) treats unexercised rights as lapsed after one year. The Delhi High Court applied 19(5) and 19(6) to a software master service agreement in 2011.

How do I verify a Gurgaon vendor without paying for a diligence report?

Two free government portals do most of the work. The GST taxpayer search returns legal name, registration date and a return filing table without any login. The EPFO establishment search returns provident fund remittance history and, usefully, other establishments registered under the same PAN.

When does the DPDP Act actually start binding my Indian vendor?

Gazette notification G.S.R. 843(E) brought sections 3 to 17 into force eighteen months after publication on 14 November 2025, which lands in mid-May 2027. Sections 18 to 26 and the Board provisions started immediately. Treat the substantive obligations as a 2027 deadline, not a present one.

Does section 17(1)(d) exempt an Indian vendor from DPDP entirely?

No. It exempts processing of personal data of data principals not within the territory of India done under a contract with a person outside India. Data about Indian users falls outside that carve-out, so a vendor building for an Indian audience carries the full obligations.

What changed for contracting with an Indian company on 1 April 2026?

The Income-tax Act 2025 came into force that day, replacing the Income-tax Act 1961. Parliament passed it on 12 August 2025 and the President assented on 21 August 2025, with the Income-tax Rules 2026 notified on 20 March 2026. Section references in older contract templates are now stale.

How does the Haryana GCC Policy 2026 affect my hiring costs in Gurugram?

It reimburses a captive centre up to 50 percent of eligible capital expenditure in non-TOD Gurugram and refunds employer provident fund contributions up to ₹25,000 per employee per year for five years. Those subsidies raise what a funded GCC can pay the engineers you also want.

Does a vendor's employment contract cover code written by its subcontractors?

Not by itself. Section 17 clause (c) reaches works made under a contract of service, meaning employment. An independent contractor works under a contract for service, so the vendor needs a separate written assignment from that contractor before it can pass clean title on to you.

How eCorpIT can help

We run the scoping engagement before the contract, so the specification, the architecture decision record and the IP assignment terms are settled before either side commits to a timeline. If you are comparing two or three Gurugram vendors, we will run the GST and EPFO checks in this article against our own entity and hand you the output, because a vendor that objects to that request has answered the question. Tell us what you are building, the constraint you are working against, and when it has to be live. Start at /contact-us/.

References

1. Copyright Act 1957, sections 17 and 19 (full text) — Copyright Office, DPIIT.
2. Pine Labs Pvt Ltd v. Gemalto Terminals India Pvt Ltd, Delhi High Court, 3 August 2011.
3. DPDP Act commencement notification G.S.R. 843(E), MeitY, dated 13 November 2025.
4. Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 (Act 22 of 2023), full text — MeitY.
5. Income-tax Act 2025 comes into force from 1st April 2026 — CBDT press release, 1 April 2026.
6. Government of Haryana notifies the Haryana Global Capability Centres Policy, 2026 — PwC India tax alert, 3 June 2026.
7. Haryana Global Capability Centres Policy 2026: incentive tables — Grant Thornton Bharat, 12 June 2026.
8. Nasscom Annual Strategic Review: FY2025E key findings — Nasscom, 24 February 2025.
9. GST taxpayer search — Goods and Services Tax Network.
10. Search Taxpayer user manual: details visible without login — GST portal documentation.
11. EPFO establishment search — Employees' Provident Fund Organisation.

Last updated: 16 August 2026.