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Gujarat names Uday Kotak chairman of Gift city
Veteran banker replaces Hasmukh Adhia amid renewed push for offshore finance
GUJARAT: The Gujarat government has appointed veteran banker Uday Kotak as chairman of Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, commonly known as Gift City, replacing former bureaucrat Hasmukh Adhia.
The appointment comes as Gift City sharpens its push to attract global capital with liberalised tax and regulatory norms, positioning itself as a rival to financial centres such as Singapore and Dubai.
Earlier this month, the Centre doubled the tax holiday for entities setting up operations in Gift City to 20 years, a move aimed at accelerating offshore banking, fund management and capital market activity within the zone.
Uday Kotak brings more than four decades of experience in India’s financial sector to the role. He is the founder and former managing director and chief executive of Kotak Mahindra Bank, which he established in 1985 as a modest bill-discounting business. Over time, the firm evolved into a diversified financial services group, spanning banking, capital markets, asset management and insurance. In 2003, it made history by becoming the first non-banking financial company in India to convert into a commercial bank. Kotak currently serves as a non-executive director on the bank’s board.
Kotak’s career is widely seen as one of the most notable entrepreneurial success stories in India’s financial services industry. In the early 1990s, Kotak Finance expanded into auto loans, investment banking and stockbroking, riding the momentum of India’s economic liberalisation in 1991. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kotak did not hail from a prominent business family nor did he have the backing of deep-pocketed institutional investors, making the firm’s early expansion particularly arduous.
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IICT partners with Gativedhi to bring studio production tools to students
New MoU lets students explore AI-driven production pipelines for AVGC-XR
MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) has teamed up with Gativedhi Technologies to give students a front-row seat to modern studio production. The collaboration will integrate Gativedhi’s AI-powered production intelligence platform, Shotrack, into academic programmes, letting students experience the workflow systems used by animation, VFX and gaming studios.
Under the MoU, faculty, students and researchers will get hands-on access to Shotrack through beta programmes, pilot deployments and academic evaluations. This will allow them to explore simulated production pipelines, understand asset management, track tasks and monitor schedules, essentially seeing how complex projects come together behind the scenes.
Shotrack is designed to tackle a key industry challenge: when multiple studios work on the same project, differing internal systems often create bottlenecks, slow approvals and complicate version control. The platform provides a unified production environment, enabling smoother collaboration across distributed teams while generating operational insights and predictive analytics to optimise crew allocation, forecast schedule risks and manage costs.
The collaboration also opens doors to Gativedhi’s wider ecosystem. Upcoming tools include StudioTrack, for studio operations management covering budgeting, recruitment and IT infrastructure, and WorkTrack, which measures workflow efficiency and team productivity across industries.
IICT plans to embed these tools into programmes covering animation pipelines, VFX workflows, gaming production and media project management. Students will also benefit from guest lectures, masterclasses, workshops, internships and research projects that connect academic learning with real-world studio practices.
IICT CEO Vishwas Deoskar, said the partnership provides “An environment where production pipeline tools can be explored, tested and refined while students gain insight into how large-scale productions are organised.”
Gativedhi Technologies founder & CEO Senthil Kumar added, “This collaboration introduces students to real-world studio management tools and helps us improve our platform with academic feedback.”
With Shotrack in classrooms, India’s future animators, VFX artists and gaming producers will get a taste of studio life long before they step into one.
