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ARTICLE · 02 NOVEMBER 2023

Unwrapping The GIFT Story In India

Touchstone Partners
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The Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (or GIFT City, as it is more popularly known) was accorded its international financial services centre status in 2015.

IndiaFinance and Banking
Sameeksha Chowla
Sameeksha Chowla
Palak Chadha
Palak Chadha
Vansh Aggarwal
Vansh Aggarwal
Mahak Goyal
Mahak Goyal
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The Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (or GIFT City, as it is more popularly known) was accorded its international financial services centre status in 2015. Whilst it started gaining traction ever since, the Government has been working "laboriously" since the last couple of years to transform the scrubland in the Indian state of Gujarat to an avant-garde international financial services district along the lines of similar international centres.

India has so far had an almost notorious reputation for being a regulatory and fiscal quagmire and whilst measures are always in the works to disentangle the tripwires, the process of formulating legislative amendments is of course quite protracted and even once the blueprint is formulated, difficult to implement given the sheer size of the country. Slightly unsurprisingly, India continues to be ranked at 63 of 190 in terms of the Doing Business 2020 report by the World Bank – quite behind other countries in the

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