Institute Of Creative Technology: India's Gateway To The Global Creative Economy

The excitement about India’s creative economy, specifically its enormous potential, has been rekindled after the mega-starrer event in Mumbai this weekend, which saw the big names in entertainment rub shoulders with the who’s who of politics from, Prime Minister Narendra Modi to minister Ashwini Vaishnav.

Content, creativity and culture, which PM Modi christened as the Orange Economy, are set to rule the roost in the coming decades both in volume and worth. The summit was heralding India’s firm-footed arrival on the world’s stage of the creative economy, which the G20 estimates will account for 10 per cent of the world’s GDP by 2030, and putting the might of the state behind this sunrise sector for all to be awed by.

There is much to be awed about—Indian films watched in about 100 countries, nearly 100 million creators in digital storytelling including animation and gaming, YouTube payouts of more than Rs 21,000 crore in the past three years to content creators and media outfits, content made in India clocking 45 billion hours of viewership across the world, and the Indian industry already pegged at USD 28 billion with an eye to touch USD 100 billion in the next decade.

To power this, the centre declared Rs 400 crore to build the first Indian Institute of Creative Technology (IICT) in Mumbai. This is a rich and glamorous gravy train that everyone would like to get a seat on. Yet, it is important to pause and ask where the train is headed, what goods it has and who it carries at this time.

The term creative economy is credited to Prof. John Howkins, but it had been around in the world before the phrase was, well, created. India’s creative economy, from its breath-taking textiles and handlooms to intricate artistic work with metals and wood, drew traders from around the world before the colonial era.

The excitement seen now, in fact, is reductive by focusing on the narrow band of films, OTT, gaming and content creation. India’s arts and science have both displayed creativity with innovation—none were visible at the summit. Today, India’s creative economy accounts for USD 121 billion in exports but is a fraction of the USD 2.2 trillion international market; design rather than films dominates this.

It faces enormous challenges from market concentration by a few players (who were at the summit) and scalability to the neglect of grassroots innovation and creation. The millions of digital content creators across India, including in its villages, have made it big on their own, without massive investments by the government or corporates, who are eyeing the big bucks in it now. This energy could, unfortunately, be stymied by institutes and structures. India’s creative economy can, hopefully, thrive in all sectors without such interference.