The Centre has appointed four members to the International Financial Services Centre Authority (IFSCA), which is a unified authority to regulate all financial services in the International Financial Services Centres (IFSCs) in the country. The four members appointed this time round are nominees from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), and Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA).
These are Indrani Banerjee, Executive Director, RBI; Sujit Prasad, Executive Director, SEBI; TL Alamelu, Member, IRDAI, and Ananta Gopal Das, Executive Director, PFRDA, sources said.
It may be recalled that the Centre had last month appointed two members — Pankaj Jain, Additional Secretary in the Department of Financial Services and Anand Mohan Bajaj, Additional Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs in the Finance Ministry, to the IFSCA. The Centre had also, in July, appointed Injeti Srinivas, a retired IAS officer and former Secretary in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, as Chairman of IFSCA.
In the recent years, India has been making concerted efforts to attract foreign businesses into its international financial services Centre (GIFT City in Gujarat). Besides providing a 10-year tax holiday, the Minimum Alternate Tax (MAT) had been slashed to 9 per cent from 18.5 per cent.
Also, commodities transaction tax (CTT), stamp duty, dividend distribution tax (DDT), and long-term capital gains (LTCG) tax have been already waived off. GIFT City in Gujarat is India’s first operational International Financial Services Centre.
With the full regulatory architecture around IFSCs almost in place, there are strong expectations that more players in the insurance, banking and stock exchange space will operate out of GIFT City in the days to come, say financial services industry observers.