Openomics 2026: Monetising the Indian Imagination

 SINCE 2008 WHEN Chhota Bheem first launched, the animation series has become a na­tional phenomenon. Sea­son after season has found children hooked to it, and there have been spin-offs into movies. Conceived by Green Gold Animations, the company is now even planning to have cafés around the characters. Re­cently, its founder Rajiv Chilaka wrote on LinkedIn, “India’s animation in­dustry is entering an important phase. With patience, original thinking, and a deep belief in homegrown ideas, Indian IPs can grow into enduring global fran­chises.” Green Gold recently sought to raise `250 crore at a valuation of `800 crore. It indicates the orange economy’s growth in India.

The term covers under its umbrel­la not just animation but the entire creative sector. It was in 2013 that it came into the mainstream. This was in a report by the Inter-American De­velopment Bank, which called it “the group of linked activities through which ideas are transformed into cul­tural goods and services whose value is determined by intellectual property. The orange universe includes: i) The Cultural Economy and the Creative industries which share the Conven­tional Cultural Industries; and ii) creativity supporting activities.” By giving it a name, the economy got its contours. Its growth and importance is a reason why Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman included it in the Union Budget, which said, “India’s An­imation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics [AVGC] sector is a growing in­dustry, projected to require 2 million professionals by 2030. I propose to sup­port the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies, Mumbai, in setting up AVGC Content Creator Labs in 15,000 secondary schools and 500 colleges.”

The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies is the nodal body that has been charged with building the skills and manpower for powering this economy. The 20 lakh professionals mentioned in the speech shows the scale of what is waiting. It is not just an economy catering to the domestic mar­ket. Take visual effects. India is now a content hub for the world in this field. An article in the India Brand Equity Foundation website last year on the growth of VFX in India spoke of how its role in big-budget movies is increasing. It said, “Indian movie hits such as ‘Ani­mal’, ‘Project K’, ‘Adipurush’, and ‘Salaar’ have been increasingly resorting to VFX, with some productions allocating up to 25% or 30% of the total costs of the proj­ects to visual effects. For example, there are over 4,000 VFX shots in ‘Adipurush’ and over 600 in ‘Salaar’; this depicts an increased usage of visual effects to tell the story. These projects reflect the tech­nical competency of Indian studios as well as hint towards the evolving ex­pectation from the audience for a fine visual experience.”

One of the eagerly awaited movies this year is ‘Ramayana’, which stars Ranbir Kapoor. It is a two-part project underpinned by VFX being done by DNEG, a British company that was bought over by Prime Focus, an Indian production house. They plan to make it at a quality that will appeal to a global audience. The Los Angeles Times, in an article, was told by the producers the goal was, “to turn ‘Ramayana’, with its grand-scale adventure story and high-tech computer-generated effects, into a full-blown international blockbuster, filmed specifically for IMAX’s giant screens in what is intended to be the largest-ever rollout for an Indian film, according to its backers.”

Gaming is another orange economy area booming in India. The market is expected to double to around US$10 billion in five years. A report by Mordor Intelligence highlights how gaming in even regional languages is taking off. It states, “Hit titles such as Ludo King crossed nearly 1 billion downloads by weaving traditional board mechanics with Hinglish chat, outperforming English-only clones in session length and retention. SuperGaming’s Indus Battle Royale embeds Indo-futuristic motifs, festival events, and region-spe­cific avatars, attracting both domestic sponsors and overseas publishers. Lo­calized interfaces across Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu now cover 80% of address­able gamers, and festival-linked live ops boost holiday spending spikes by up to 30% in the India gaming market.” It is an industry that needs a wide gamut of cre­ative professionals, from graphic design­ers, coders, writers, actors, engineers, etc.

While the Budget specifically men­tions animation, visual effects, gaming, and comics under the subheading of ‘Or­ange Economy’, it is much more broad-based. It includes even the world of con­tent creation by influencers. Consider one of India’s biggest podcasts, Beer Biceps. The man behind it, Ranveer Allahbadia, started off as a fitness trainer in Mumbai, went on to YouTubing and now the pod­cast features everyone from ministers to businessmen. There is only one face to the show but a small army of profession­als create and distribute the content, in­cluding editors, sound engineers, digital marketing experts, and so on. If you go to their social media channels, they are now offering courses for video editing. Tracxn estimates the annual revenue of Monk Entertainment, the name of the startup, to be around `100 crore. Such a venture would not have been possible two de­cades ago because it needed social media, podcasting, video streaming, and other technologies to come of age. When they do, entirely new fields are born. There are millions now on social media creating video and audio content because it has the potential to be a career by itself. As they become successful, creative profes­sionals are required to service them. The Budget’s number of `250 crore might be a drop in the big picture, but the messaging is important.

A great advantage of a thriving or­ange economy for a country is not just the kind of opportunities it opens up, but to whom. A World Bank report of 2023 titled ‘Jobs in the Orange Econo­my: Impact of Disruptive Technologies’ stated that youth were naturally drawn to these fields, but interestingly, this was greater in low-income countries. So also was the gender gap less. It said, “Fur­thermore, the share of youth is larger in low-income countries than advanced countries. Although developing coun­tries have a larger proportion of youth in the world, this figure highlights the important contribution of the orange economy as a source of employment opportunities, particularly for youth in the less developed world. Employment across creative economy sectors has a much smaller gender gap in compari­son to other revenue-generating sectors of global economy. Rather, as support­ed by data from a study of 35 low- and middle-income countries surveyed by UNESCO, more women than men are employed in cultural work in over half of countries surveyed.”

The orange economy will, however, face disruptions too. Artificial intelli­gence (AI) is going to make many of the jobs it requires redundant. If a user can make animations or edit videos using prompts, then the necessity of experts for those jobs reduces. But it would still need people with a new set of skills al­lied to AI. The orange economy itself does not falter because, as India becomes more prosperous, the demand for what it is creating can only grow.