Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made an announcement during her Budget 2022 speech on 1 February that India’s creative industries have been waiting for a long time.
Sitharaman announced the setting up of an Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, and Comics promotion task force while presenting the Union Budget.
“An AVGC promotion task force, with all stakeholders, will be set up to recommend ways to realize this and build domestic capacity for serving our markets and the global demand,” said Sitharaman.
The larger idea behind this announcement is to give a fillip to youth employment potential in this sector. The announcement has garnered a mostly positive response from industry players.
Manish Agarwal, CEO of Mumbai-based mobile gaming and entertainment company Nazara Technologies, said that the task force would facilitate employment for the youth. “India presently commands around 10 percent of the global AVGC market, and has the potential to reach 20 to 25 percent by 2027,” he said.
Gaming, a growing sector in India
According to a Redseer report done with Lumikai, India’s gaming market is expected to jump from $2.2 billion in value in 2021 to $7 billion by 2026. Also, India’s gamer base is expected to touch 700 million by 2025. The report also found that gaming company studios increased from just 25 in 2015 to over 500 in 2021.
Speaking to Firstpost, Salone Sehgal, general partner at Lumikai said that the taskforce was a step in the right direction. “Task forces are useful for achieving awareness and education as well as recommending actions to policy makers. It can result in outcomes such as increased employment in the sector, clarity on regulations, and private sector funding attracting more domestic and global venture capital funds,” said Sehgal.
Back in December 2020, Minister for Information and Broadcasting Prakash Javadekar called AVGC a sunrise sector. He also announced that the government was forming a Centre of Excellence [CoE] in partnership with IIT Bombay, where courses in the AVGC sector would be provided. The Karnataka government has also launched an AVGC Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru.
When asked about the challenges facing the task force when it comes to the gaming industry, Sehgal outlined four aspects that needed immediate attention to ensure the task force led to policy outcomes.
- Talent development: The creation of Centres of Excellence encourages institutes to come up with video game development courses. This has to be a constant endeavour to encourage youth to take up game tech and game design as a mainstream career option.
- Financing: This includes a combination of government and private sector financing.
- Access to global best practices: Having worked in the gaming sector for over a decade, Sehgal has seen the benefits of knowledge exchange between industries in different geographies. According to her, India has a thriving deep tech and animation sector, but there is still a lot to learn when it comes to best practices in areas like data science, UI/UX design, and there is immense potential for collaboration.
- Building from India for the world: “The last two years have been exciting, and Indian companies are seizing the global landscape in the B2B, SaaS, and edtech space. We should be leading from the front when it comes to gaming culture and entertainment as well,” noted Sehgal.
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