City of Berlin opens business office in Bengaluru, India

Berlin Economy Minister Franziska Giffey (SPD) has announced the opening of the “Berlin Business Office India” in Bengaluru, India.

Business from Berlin to Bengaluru

The city of Berlin has opened a new Berlin Business Office in Bengaluru, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Berlin already operates Business Offices in New York and Peking.

Supported by the German-Indian Chamber of Commerce and the government of Karnataka, the Berlin Business Office Bengaluru will serve as a “central point of contact for Berlin-based companies and startups looking to enter the Indian market” and “to assist Indian companies in establishing a presence in Berlin”.

Bengaluru is India’s fourth-largest city and home to around 25.000 IT companies. IT has long been a sector facing worker shortages in Germany. But according to a 2025 report from the Institute for Economic Research (IW) in Cologne, the national demand for IT professionals fell by 26,2 percent between 2023 and 2024.

This is just one of Germany’s steps to strengthen economic ties between the federal republic and India. 2023 saw then Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announce a new visa pathway for Indian IT professionals to come to Germany.

Young Indians are highly educated and unemployed

Like many European countries, Germany is currently facing a demographic crisis. For socioeconomic and personal reasons, young people are having fewer children, while baby boomer employees are entering retirement.

India’s demographics are increasingly lopsided in a different way. With the largest youth population in the world, 367 million young people aged 15 to 29 make up a third of the working-age population. While educational enrollment has surged, graduate job prospects are few and far between. According to a BBC report, nearly 40 percent of graduates in India are unemployed.

While young Indians hope the path from education to well-paid employment will improve, many are opting to emigrate in the meantime. But some economists predict India's hopes of a demographic dividend - when the working population far outnumbers the non-working-age population - will begin to disappear from around 2030.