Revised 18 September 2026 · v1.0.0 · what changed

GIFT City's International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) is routinely described as India's push to build an offshore insurance and reinsurance hub. The regulator's own quarterly statistical bulletin — 26 numbered tables, published each quarter on ifsca.gov.in, free and no login — lets that claim be checked directly. Summed across the four quarters of FY2024-25 (Apr 2024–Mar 2025), IFSC Insurance Offices (IIOs) wrote $12.42 million of gross direct insurance premium and $195.45 million of reinsurance premium. Reinsurance is 94.0% of the centre's entire insurance book.

What the tables actually show

Direct life insurance — the retail product line closest to what "insurance hub" usually implies to a reader — totalled just $2.54 million across all four quarters combined: under ₹25 crore, written from a jurisdiction that hosted 18 registered insurance offices and 27 intermediary offices as of March 2025. Set beside GIFT IFSC's own banking leg on the same quarterly dashboard — $88.51 billion in banking assets — the entire insurance book (direct plus reinsurance, $207.87 million) is roughly 1/426th the size, or about 0.2%.

The domestic mirror image

This blog has already reported the domestic side of the same pipe: every general insurance policy written in India carries a compulsory 4% cession of sum insured to GIC Re, a single state-owned reinsurer — see The 4% Nobody Notices, and Three Other Things. Put the two findings side by side: India compels a fixed 4% share of domestic general-insurance premium into one state reinsurer at home, while the offshore centre purpose-built to pull in international reinsurance capacity writes $195 million a year — both real, both wholesale-side flows, and both a long way from the retail insurance most readers picture when they hear "insurance hub."

The takeaway

GIFT IFSC's insurance leg, on its own regulator's numbers, is a wholesale reinsurance operation with a token direct-insurance sideline. That is not necessarily a policy failure — wholesale reinsurance capacity is real, dollar-denominated, and was presumably easier to attract first — but it is a materially different achievement from the retail "offshore insurance hub" the centre is marketed as, and the gap between the marketing and the tables is large enough that it should be named plainly rather than assumed away.

Sources: IFSCA Bulletin, Jan–Mar 2025 edition, Division of Economic Policy and Analysis, International Financial Services Centres Authority (ifsca.gov.in), fetched and read directly 2026-09-08 for this account's research corpus (HTTP 200, 4.6 MB PDF, text extracted with pdftotext -layout); Tables 24, 25 and 26 summed across all four FY2024-25 quarters. Front matter states the source is "the periodic reports submitted by the regulated entities to IFSCA" and grants explicit reproduction permission with acknowledgement. Banking-assets figure from the same bulletin's headline dashboard, as on/during Mar 2025.

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See also: The 4% Nobody Notices, and Three Other Things · Premium Now, Claim Later: The Float India's Car Boom Is Building · Who Collects India's GST, and Who Actually Pays It.

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.