GIFT wrapped: The unexpected second purpose of Gujarat's financial hub
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Saurabh Mukherjea is not the kind of fund manager who hedges his bets with careful language. The founder of Marcellus Investment Managers, one of India’s more closely watched boutique fund houses, has made a career of saying out loud what others whisper.His latest vehicle for that is a book—Breakpoint: The Crisis of the Middle Class and the Future of Work, published by Juggernaut in March 2026 and co-written with economist Nandita Rajhansa and human resources professional Sapana Bhavsar.“I have argued in my book that India is not creating enough jobs for the middle and lower income segments,” he said. “This would mean that the opportunity to invest in Indian businesses will come down over the next several years.
The investment in overseas stocks and businesses offers a good hedge.”Marcellus has already set up a fund in GIFT City—Gujarat International Finance Tec-City—the somewhat grandly named financial hub near Gandhinagar. And it is about to launch a second one. The corpus so far: roughly ₹1,000 crore, all of it aimed at international markets.Mirae Asset has a GIFT City fund, too.
So does DSP Investment Managers. More are coming.GIFT City, it turns out, has found a second purpose. And it’s a rather more exciting one than what it was originally built for.To understand what’s happening in the financial hub today, you need to go back to why it was built at all.When Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, first sketched out the idea in 2007, the pitch was straightforward.
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