Pariksha SaathiSitharaman Wraps Up Singapore Visit Aimed at Drawing Long-Term Investment into India
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has concluded a four-day official visit to Singapore (8–11 October 2026), the Finance Ministry said on 12 October. She called on President Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and met Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong and Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan. The talks reviewed follow-up on the 4th India–Singapore Ministerial Roundtable and the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, and looked ahead to Singapore's chairmanship of ASEAN in 2027. Much of the visit was investor outreach: a roundtable with firms such as BlackRock, JPMorgan, PIMCO, Carlyle and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, plus one-on-one meetings with Singapore's sovereign investors GIC and Temasek and with DBS, Standard Chartered, MUFG and Intel, among others. She pitched a list of infrastructure projects from the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) pipeline and encouraged investors to use GIFT IFSC in Gujarat. With the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the two sides discussed tokenisation of financial assets, central bank digital currencies and interoperable settlement systems, with Singapore offering to share its tokenisation experience. The NIIF CEO and the chairperson of the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) accompanied her.
Drafted with AI assistance from the official PIB release linked above and checked against it by a second AI pass. Not line-edited by a human.
Learning context
The International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) was established on 27 April 2020 under the International Financial Services Centres Authority Act, 2019, and is headquartered at GIFT City, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. It is a unified regulator for financial products, services and institutions in International Financial Services Centres (IFSCs) in India; GIFT IFSC in Gujarat is the country's first IFSC.
Reference: International Financial Services Centres Authority, official website
Check yourself: before IFSCA existed, who regulated banking, capital-market and insurance business in the IFSC?
Three separate regulators: RBI for banking, SEBI for capital markets and IRDAI for insurance. The 2019 Act brought these powers for IFSCs under a single regulator, IFSCA.
Revision task: sort the institutions named in this news into Singapore's central bank and state-owned investors (MAS, GIC, Temasek), Indian bodies (NIIF, IFSCA) and private investors, as matching questions often mix these up.
Test yourself
During her Singapore visit, which Gujarat-based financial centre did Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman encourage investors to use?
Show the answer
Answer: GIFT IFSC
On her 8-11 October visit she pitched infrastructure projects from the NIIF pipeline and urged investors to use GIFT IFSC in Gujarat; she also discussed tokenisation of financial assets and central bank digital currencies with the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
Read the daily collection → · Editorial standards & corrections