New Delhi - : Saudi Arabia will soon be setting up an office in India’s Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City) Saudi’s Investment Minister, Khalid bin Abdulaziz Al-Falih has said.

“We will send a strong delegation from Saudi to India in the next few weeks to set up an office of ‘sovereign wealth fund’ in GIFT City,” Al-Falih said speaking at the Saudi-India investment forum in New Delhi.

GIFT City is India’s tax-neutral financial services centre and a business district under construction in Gandhinagar district in Gujarat. It is India’s first operational greenfield smart city and international financial services centre, which the Government of Gujarat promoted as a greenfield project.

India’s trade with Saudi Arabia in 2022-23 amounted to $52.76 billion, with exports at $10.73 billion and imports at $42.04 billion. As such, India had a trade deficit of $31.31 billion with Saudi Arabia in the last financial year.

Over the last year, Indian authorities have pushed the use of the rupee globally, with the RBI announcing the setting up of a mechanism to settle global trade in rupees in July 2022. Early use of this system was seemingly for the purchase of discounted oil from sanction-hit Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. However, the mechanism has not taken off, with reports emerging that negotiations over the settlement of bilateral trade in rupees between India and Russia had been suspended after Russia had accumulated billions of rupees in Indian banks which it could not use.