Orange Is the New Money: The creative economy can become an engine of India’s growth

IN JUNE 2025, Prada launched a high-end handcrafted leather sandal whose design closely resembled the Indian Kolhapuri chappal, a centuries-old craft from Maharashtra and Karnataka that holds a Geographical Indication (GI) tag in India. The episode drew attention not only because of the resemblance but because it exposed a deeper economic question: How should a country think about culture when cultural value is being created, circulated and monetised across global markets at an unprecedented speed?

It is about whether a country has the institutions to recognise culture as an economic system rather than a residual tradition: one that generates not only sales, exports and tourism but also skills, intellectual property, soft power, and new forms of productive capability.

The challenge of India’s orange economy is not only to protect heritage or ensure that communities receive a fairer share of value. It is also to build the frameworks through which cultural production can be financed, measured, governed and scaled as a serious part of development strategy.

The “orange economy”, a term coined by Felipe Buitrago and Iván Duque, refers to industries whose value is grounded in creativity, cultural expression, and intellectual property. It includes film, music, publishing, design, gaming, fashion, handicrafts, festivals, architecture, and wellness. Globally, creative industries account for roughly 3.1 per cent of GDP and more than 6 per cent of employment, making them one of the fastest growing segments of the modern economy. Cultural industries create value at multiple levels simultaneously. At the most visible level lies direct economic value: export revenues, tourism receipts, streaming income, licensing fees and box office returns. Beneath this lies a deeper social economy: the livelihoods of artists, the preservation of traditional knowledge systems, and the transmission of skills across generations. Finally, there is strategic value, or soft power, through which culture shapes how a country is perceived, influencing everything from tourism and education flows to global demand for its products. The real significance of the orange economy lies in how effectively countries link these layers together.

India’s creative sector already demonstrates significant scale. According to the Economic Survey 2025-26, the country’s media and entertainment industry is valued at around `2.5 trillion, with digital media contributing nearly a third of total revenue. The sector is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.8 per cent in the coming years. India is also the world’s largest film producer by volume, accounting for roughly 29 per cent of global film output, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The broader creative economy employs around 8 per cent of India’s workforce, much of it consisting of women and young workers. With almost 65 per cent of its population below the age of 35, India possesses a demographic advantage that few major economies can match. However, scale alone does not guarantee strategic value. Much of India’s creative production still generates activity without consistently producing durable intellectual property or globally licensed cultural assets.

India’s creative goods exports stand at roughly $21 billion, placing the country among the world’s leading exporters in the sector. Nearly 60 per cent of creative goods exports consist of jewellery, followed by fashion accessories. This matters because creative goods and intellectual property generate value in different ways. Physical goods produce revenue once, while intellectual property can generate royalties repeatedly across markets, platforms and time.

India possesses more than 600 GI-tagged products. The cherry-picking of unique products from across India’s geographies empowers artisan communities to claim their rightful share. The government’s One District One Product (ODOP) scheme, covering over 1,200 products, including one-third of India’s GI-tagged products is increasingly building export channels, digital marketplaces (GeM) and formalisation frameworks for the finest crafts. India’s orange economy is not short of creativity, but it needs to further scale its investment in the institutional ecosystem and go beyond initiatives like ODOP, which have laid this foundation.

Countries that have succeeded in building globally competitive creative clusters have typically done so through deliberate institutional investment rather than relying solely on cultural production. South Korea’s Hallyu, or Korean Wave, is perhaps the leading example. Through sustained public investment and policy coordination, the country developed a global cultural export ecosystem spanning K-pop, cinema, fashion, beauty products, and food. Japan offers another model. Through the Cool Japan initiative, launched in 2010, the country established a government-backed investment fund to support the international expansion of Japanese cultural industries, including anime, manga, gaming, design, and cuisine. Brazil offers another very interesting example through its Carnival economy. Often viewed simply as a tourism spectacle, Carnival actually operates as a year-round production ecosystem. In 2025 alone, Brazil’s Carnival generated more than $2 billion in tourism activity, while supporting thousands of creative workers across informal and formal sectors.

India’s creative economy already reflects many of the ingredients seen in successful global examples: a deep cultural reservoir, a rapidly expanding digital ecosystem and a large domestic market that allows creative industries to scale quickly. Yet India’s creative economy clusters are concentrated in only a few metropolitan centres, leaving a vast cultural reservoir untapped. From the Northeast’s indigenous design traditions and cinematic landscapes to Odisha’s arts, such as Pattachitra, textiles and performance traditions, there is tremendous potential for these to become vibrant creative hubs. India’s exploding concert economy, where over one lakh people show up for a Coldplay concert in Ahmedabad, homegrown artists sell out, and the Ziro Music Festival in Arunachal Pradesh becomes Asia’s most beloved music destination further signals that live entertainment is an economy within an economy. The Maha Kumbh Mela 2025 was not only one of the world’s largest human gatherings and religious pilgrimages but also showcased India’s potential for spiritual tourism. It generated substantial economic activity across the hospitality, logistics, handicrafts, performing arts, sanitation sectors and rural communities. The next stage of the orange economy lies in how these strengths evolve into new domains of value creation, as well as in the sectors where creativity, technology and intellectual property increasingly intersect.

One of the most prominent frontiers where this intersection is already visible is India’s animation and visual effects industry. The sector has expanded rapidly in recent years and is increasingly attracting global studios seeking high-quality digital production capabilities. Yet much of India’s participation remains concentrated in outsourced production services. Moving up the value chain towards original intellectual property would allow the industry to capture far greater value. Gaming represents perhaps the most dynamic emerging frontier in the digital ecosystem. It already has the potential due to its young, digitally connected population, which could make it a major hub for gaming and content creation. Opportunities lie in creating franchises rooted in Indian mythology, history, and aesthetics, drawing on storytelling traditions similar to those of Japan and South Korea.

India does not lack cultural imagination. The orange economy could become one of the country’s most distinctive engines of growth. What is required now is another push to measure, finance, and scale those clusters across the country to meet the untapped demand of the global market.