IFSC will make Guj a finance hub: FM
GANDHINAGAR: Finance minister Arun Jaitley said the NDA government is committed to making the country’s tax regime internationally compatible and nonadversarial to attract foreign investments in places such as Gujarat’s GIFT city, where the country’s first International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) is coming up.
On Friday, Jaitley and top officials of the finance ministry and e-commerce and regulatory heads of Sebi, IRDA and RBI unveiled regulations and guidelines for setting up IFSCs in special economic zones in Gandhinagar.
“With IFSC at GIFT, the state is trying to become the hub for financial services which was earlier attributed to Mumbai,” Jaitley said, lauding the Gujarat government’s ambitious project, which seeks to be an international financial services hub along the lines of Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong.
According to him, the GIFT city, conceptualised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his tenure as Gujarat chief minister, will become a role model for smart cities that the government plans to create across the country.
The Gujarat International Finance Tec-City is located on the bank of river Sabarmati between Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar. Once completed, it will be a hub for financial services such as insurance, off shore banking activities, global trading exchanges, commodity exchanges and capital markets, and is expected to create a million jobs directly and indirectly.
The IFSC rules open the doors for domestic and foreign banks to set up backend offices in the GIFT City.