WM's India unit grew from 150 logistics staff to a 2,100-person global centre
Kapil Behl spent a decade turning a small Indore acquisition into WM's global capability centre — including a camera audit that added $300 million of revenue.
What was changed
When Kapil Behl joined WM's India operations in the mid-2010s, the Fortune 200 waste giant's presence was a small Indore-based acquisition supporting logistics tracking, 'and they didn't have any clue on how to scale it', he says. The organisation was ad hoc: communication with the US was poor, and India lacked foundational HR, finance, administration and compliance systems, with work flowing in only when individual teams needed help. Behl's first priority was structure, not growth.
He reframed the pitch to WM's conservative US leadership — 'labour arbitrage will come as a byproduct; you should focus on value-add and transformation' — added a second centre in Gurugram for finance, analytics and digital talent, and introduced leadership to India's SEZ tax benefits. The inflection point came when India began contributing directly to revenue: auditing truck loads with camera data and machine learning to find customers receiving more service than they paid for — a process Behl says has added about $300 million of revenue for WM Global, run by 200 people instead of 2,000.
By 2025 WM India employed around 2,100 people, up from roughly 150 in 2016 — spanning finance and shared services, customer experience, WM-specific operations, data science and ERP platforms. Talent ran on the same discipline: about 80% of senior roles filled internally, twice-yearly promotion cycles, attrition below 15%, and appraisals never paused — not even during the pandemic, when global leadership approved one-time support bonuses. The next phase, Behl says, is integration: making WM India a centre of excellence in analytics and core operations rather than 'a labour centre'.
Why it worked
WM India's first years were ad hoc, with no organisational structure and no back-office foundations to build on.
WM's conservative, US-focused leadership was indifferent to incremental savings and protective of American jobs, so credibility had to come before scale.
Direct revenue impact — the $300 million truck-load audit — was the argument that converted 17 largely independent area business units into believers.
What can be applied
A captive centre earns scale through credibility: skip the labour-arbitrage pitch, deliver revenue impact first, and global leadership will hand you more of the enterprise.
Aftermath
Behl's stated goal is integration rather than expansion: advanced analytics, data science and deeper involvement in core decision-making, with a longer-term aspiration that WM's global expertise might one day translate into operations in India itself.