GIFT: Finance city director suggests market realities "ignored" while initiating Modi's dream project

RK Jha, director, GIFT

Is the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s top dream project – Gujarat International Finance Tec-city (GIFT) -- all set to be scaled down? Proposed as India’s premier financial hub for more than Rs 78,000 crore, questions began asked about its viability ever since it was first announced in 2007. If earlier only bureaucrats in the state capital Gandhinagar doubted it would be anything more than a real estate hub, now it transpires that the man who promised to make GIFT a big success has questioned its viability.

In what may prove to be major embarrassment of those seeking to promote Modi’s developmental image, GIFT director RK Jha, who had promised Modi to turning GIFT something like Singapore's or Shanghai's financial hub, has been quoted as saying that the plan to have GIFT “ignored market conditions”.

In a recent news article, The New York Times (NYT) has said, “RK Jha, director of the project since 2010, said it (GIFT) needed to be radically scaled down, and reduced the first phase of construction to two 29-story office buildings, the tallest structures in Gujarat.”

Pointing towards the plight of GIFT as of today, NYT has said, “So far, there are only four tenants, including the state electricity commission (Gujarat Electricity Regulatory Commission or GERC) and the development company behind the project (Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services or IL&FS).”

Citing it an example of how Modi tries to build dream among people without seeking to answer the question whether it would be realized, NYT says, “One case study can be found around seven miles from the airport in Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat, where two modern office buildings stand in the middle of a dry, empty field.”

“This GIFT City intended as an international finance centre. The project was introduced to fanfare in 2007, after Modi was inspired on a visit to Shanghai”, the NYT article, written by Ellen Barry, under the title “Policies Help an Indian Candidate Trying to Go National” (May 6), says, adding, “The initial plans, drawn up by a Chinese design institute, were grandiose, calling for the simultaneous construction of 125 glassy skyscrapers, the highest reaching 1,000 feet, with underground roadways and midair pedestrian bridges.”

It is not without reason that, nearly two years ago, Gujarat babus had sensed that GIFT would be a non-starter. A high-level meeting of state secretaries (click HERE to read) sharply criticized the GIFT project, following a presentation by Jha on how he proposed to turn it into a financial hub. They told Jha that GIFT's priorities had all gone awry. State bureaucrats particularly wondered what did GERC, whose job is to decide on fixing tariffs for different segments of consumers, had anything to do with a finance city.

Babus questioned the decision to shift the GERC office to the new GIFT site following an agreement, which finalized to sell GERC a 29,000 sq-feet floor space on the sixth floor of one of the two 29-storey towers. "There is a huge gap between what GIFT was visualized and what you are presenting it to us. Do you want GIFT to be a conglomerate of different types of offices? What would GERC do there? And, why do you want nationalized banks to open offices when it should be a hub for metal trading, stock trading, hedging and private sector insurance and banking?," they wondered.

About half-a-dozen top bureaucrats, including the then additional chief secretary (ACS) planning Varun Maira, the then ACS home and general administration Varesh Sinha, the then principal secretary, forests and environment, S K Nanda, principal secretary, and energy and petrochemicals D Jagatheesa Pandian, asked the GIFT director to work out priorities.

One of them told Jha, "You seem to have come here to sell GIFT to government-run corporations. First the PSUs were asked to contribute their corporate social responsibility funds for the world's proposed tallest building, Sardar Statue, overlooking the Narmada dam. Then it was the turn of Metro-link Express for Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad to demand money from PSUs. Now it is GIFT which wants PSUs to buy up office space. What's going on? When will everyone stop pulling PSUs in different directions like this?"

The babus were also unimpressed when the presentation which said that the height of the buildings in GIFT will reach up to 150 storeys when the international airport is shifted from Ahmedabad to Dholera, about 100 kilometres away. "You can't talk in just ifs and buts," said one official. On the issue of having a huge exhibition complex in GIFT, a second official wondered if this is its core activity.” On the issue of having call centres and IT firms in GIFT, another official wondered, "What is the difference between GIFT and the Infocity?"

Comments

Ahmedabad's civic chaos: Drainage woes, waterlogging, and the illusion of Olympic dreams

In response to my blog on overflowing gutter lines at several spots in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur, a heavily populated area, a close acquaintance informed me that it's not just the middle-class housing societies that are affected by the nuisance. Preeti Das, who lives in a posh locality in what is fashionably called the SoBo area, tells me, "Things are worse in our society, Applewood."

RP Gupta a scapegoat to help Govt of India manage fallout of Adani case in US court?

RP Gupta, a retired 1987-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has found himself at the center of a growing controversy. During my tenure as the Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar (1997–2012), I often interacted with him. He struck me as a straightforward officer, though I never quite understood why he was never appointed to what are supposed to be top-tier departments like industries, energy and petrochemicals, finance, or revenue.

PharmEasy: The only online medical store which revises prices upwards after confirming the order

For senior citizens — especially those without a family support system — ordering medicines online can be a great relief. Shruti and I have been doing this for the last couple of years, and with considerable success. We upload a prescription, receive a verification call from a doctor, and within two or three days, the medicines are delivered to our doorstep.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

Environmental report raises alarm: Sabarmati one of four rivers with nonylphenol contamination

A new report by Toxics Link , an Indian environmental research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund , a global non-profit headquartered in New York, has raised the alarm that Sabarmati is one of five rivers across India found to contain unacceptable levels of nonylphenol (NP), a chemical linked to "exposure to carcinogenic outcomes, including prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women."

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.

Tracking a lost link: Soviet-era legacy of Gujarati translator Atul Sawani

The other day, I received a message from a well-known activist, Raju Dipti, who runs an NGO called Jeevan Teerth in Koba village, near Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar. He was seeking the contact information of Atul Sawani, a translator of Russian books—mainly political and economic—into Gujarati for Progress Publishers during the Soviet era. He wanted to collect and hand over scanned soft copies, or if possible, hard copies, of Soviet books translated into Gujarati to Arvind Gupta, who currently lives in Pune and is undertaking the herculean task of collecting and making public soft copies of Soviet books that are no longer available in the market, both in English and Indian languages.

Boeing 787 under scrutiny again after Ahmedabad crash: Whistleblower warnings resurface

A heart-wrenching tragedy has taken place in Ahmedabad. As widely reported, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane crashed shortly after taking off from the city’s airport, currently operated by India’s top tycoon, Gautam Adani. The aircraft was carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members. As expected, the crash has led to an outpouring of grief across the country. At the same time, there have been demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Venkaiah Naidu. The most striking comment came from BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, who stated : "When a train derailed in the 1950s, Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned. On the same morality, I demand PM Modi, HM Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Naidu resign so that a free and fair inquiry can be held. All that Modi and his associates have been doing so far is gallivanting, which must stop." Amidst widespread mourning, some fringe elements sought to communalize the tragedy. One post ...

Revisiting Gijubhai: Pioneer of child-centric education and the caste debate

It was Krishna Kumar, the well-known educationist, who I believe first introduced me to the name — Gijubhai Badheka (1885–1939). Hailing from Bhavnagar, known as the cultural capital of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Gijubhai, Kumar told me during my student days, made significant contributions to the field of pedagogy — something that hasn't received much attention from India's education mandarins. At that time, Kumar was my tutorial teacher at Kirorimal College, Delhi University.

Search This Blog