Blitz India Business
NEW DELHI: Assets at the GIFT International Financial Services Centre have crossed $111 billion, with banking assets alone above $100 billion. More than 1,100 firms now operate there, employing roughly 30,000 professionals. Those are respectable numbers for a nine-year-old financial centre. The more revealing figure is smaller and more specific. As of March 2026, 35 aircraft lessors and 36 ship lessors were operating from GIFT, with more than 370 aviation assets and 37 ships leased through structures domiciled there — the aviation portfolio carrying an aggregate value of roughly $5.8 billion.
Aircraft leasing is the reason an Indian IFSC was worth building in the first place. Indian carriers lease the overwhelming majority of the aircraft they fly, and for decades those leases were written in Dublin and, more recently, in other offshore centres. The economics of that arrangement were straightforward and one-sided: an Indian airline paid lease rentals in dollars to a foreign-domiciled lessor, and the fee income, the tax base, the legal work and the specialist employment all stayed abroad. Every aircraft moved onto a GIFT-domiciled lease reverses a slice of that flow. At 370 assets and $5.8 billion, the slice is now large enough to be visible in the balance of payments rather than merely in a policy document.
Where the lease is written: 370 aviation assets worth about $5.8 billion are now leased through GIFT-domiciled structures — fee income, tax base and specialist employment that previously sat offshore.
India’s airlines have always leased their fleets. The only question ever at issue was which country collected the fee for writing the lease.
At a Glance
• Total IFSC assets: above $111 billion; banking assets above $100 billion
• Firms: more than 1,100, employing roughly 30,000 professionals
• Aircraft lessors: 35, as of March 2026
• Ship lessors: 36, as of March 2026
• Aviation assets leased: more than 370, aggregate value about $5.8 billion
• Ships leased: 37
• Stated ambition: a $50 billion aviation finance sector operating from GIFT IFSC
• Ecosystem: banks, insurers, exchanges, fund managers, professional services firms and foreign university campuses
Set the $5.8 billion against the scale of what Indian aviation has on order and the size of the remaining opportunity becomes clear rather than discouraging. Indian carriers hold among the largest narrow-body order books in the world; the aircraft attached to those orders will be delivered over the coming decade and almost all of them will be financed through a lease of some kind. The stated ambition of a $50 billion aviation finance sector at GIFT is therefore not a stretch target invented for a summit — it is roughly what capturing a meaningful share of India’s own delivery schedule would produce. Ship leasing, at 37 vessels and 36 registered lessors, is at an earlier point on the same curve, and matters disproportionately for a country moving most of its trade by sea on foreign-owned bottoms.
What determines whether the curve continues is not incentive design, which is largely done, but institutional depth: the availability of specialist aviation finance lawyers, appraisers, technical asset managers and insurers within the zone, and the predictability of dispute resolution when a lease goes wrong. Dublin’s advantage was never primarily tax; it was thirty years of accumulated professional expertise and a body of settled case law that lessors trusted. GIFT is building both, and 1,100 firms with 30,000 professionals is the raw material. The constructive measure of progress over the next three years will not be the headline asset figure. It will be whether a foreign lessor with no Indian exposure chooses to domicile an aircraft at GIFT for a non-Indian airline — the point at which a domestic financial centre becomes an international one.