GIFT City Offers Unique, Seamless Experience To Companies: Shri Dipesh Shah, Executive Director, IFSCA

Bengaluru, January 20, 2025 –“GIFT City is India’s first attempt at creating a Smart City, located between Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar is developing on a walk-to-work concept, with 67% meant for commercial activities, 22% for residential facilities and 11% for social facilities like schools, hospitals, and clubs. The City offers a unique positioning for fintech startups, allowing them to experiment with products under four regulators in one place: banking, insurance, capital market, and pension, said Shri Dipesh Shah, Executive Director, International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA), during a session on ‘The GIFT of Opportunity: The Strategic Advantage of setting up GCCs’, at the 19th India Digital Summit (IDS) today.

The two-day IDS 2025 is being organized by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) in collaboration with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, supported by Digital India, Skill India and Make in India.

Elaborating on  the facilities of the GIFT City, Shri Shah said, “It has an innovation box and sandbox for startups to experiment and direct authorization for revenue-generating fintechs to start commercial activities on day one. Currently, 44 fintech firms from 70 countries are onboarded in GIFT City, taking advantage of its partnerships with regulators outside India, such as Singapore, Luxembourg, and Sweden. These partnerships enable fintechs to onboard parallelly into other sandboxes, expanding their reach.”

Shri Shah added, ” GIFT City is India’s first digging-free City with no work-in-progress boards because every utility runs underground, and the utility tunnels are about 7X7 meters in size, so the maintenance vehicle can go inside and repair easily. As a result, the citizens don’t face any problems when the City is under maintenance. The City also runs on India’s first district cooling concept. None of the buildings have split AC or window activities at the city level. Everything runs on a district cooling system. There is also an automated waste management system under which no garbage van comes into the City to dispose of the garbage. There is also a mandate that no manufacturing or polluting industry can operate in that City. It gives you a flavor of a focused approach to making this a finance and technology hub. “

The 19^th IDS is being Powered by NPCI. Amazon.in and MPL are Platinum partners. Among Gold Partners are PhonePe; Australia Trade and Investment Commission; IDA Ireland; Paytm ads, Jagran New Media and Exotel. Route Mobile is the Cloud Communications Partner. Silver Partners include AWS, ShareChat, Shiprocket; Times Internet, and TV9 Network.