Background: Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is an ever-growing epidemic in India, and poses significant morbidity, mortality, and socioeconomic burden. Introduction: Growth differentiation factor-15 (GDF15) is a stress-responsive cytokine, increased in T2DM patients compared to control subjects without the disease. We aimed to assess whether serum GDF15 and adipose tissue GDF15 expression can differentiate between obese pre-diabetes and T2DM and control populations. Methodology: We recruited 156 individuals including 73 type 2 diabetes, 30 pre-diabetes, and 53 healthy controls. Clinical history, anthropometric measurements and biochemical profiling were done. Insulin resistance indices were calculated following HOMA models. Serum GDF15 was measured by sandwich ELISA. Visceral adipose tissue (VAT) expression of GDF15 was observed in 17 T2DM patients and 29 controls using SYBR Green chemistry in RT-PCR using GAPDH as housekeeping gene. The data were analyzed on R programming platform using RStudio. Results: Serum GDF15 was significantly higher (p Conclusion: Hence, serum GDF15 is a biomarker for T2DM patients in our study population from Western India. However, larger prospective cohorts are necessary to validate this claim.