India’s government has backed a plan to grow the country’s animation, vfx, gaming, and comics industries exponentially over the next eight years and plans to create nearly 2 million jobs during that time.
What’s the plan? Submitted to the government by India’s Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, Comics, and Extended Reality (AVGC-XR) Promotion Task Force, the plan includes several major suggestions on how the government can help grow those sectors, and where it will need to invest to do so. Suggestions include, but are not limited to:
- Launching a “Create in India” campaign to focus on domestic content creation, including financial support from the government.
- Host gaming industry events in cities across the country focused on co-production and innovation.
- Train 70,000 school teachers in the AVGC sector, with classes for middle and high school students, as well as undergraduate courses in animation, visual effects, graphic design, and digital filmmaking, among other specialities.
- Establish an international AVGC platform to draw in direct foreign investment backed by international co-production treaties.
- Launch an animation-dedicated channel on Doordarshan (India’s public broadcaster).
- Establish national and regional educational centers.
- Update national education policy to include AVGC education in schools across the country.
How many people will work in India’s AVGC sector? The task force is estimating that by 2030, India will have more than 2 million workers in the AVGC sector. That would be an incredible increase over the country’s current count of 185,000 such employees and 30,000 indirect employees. Whether that number is realistic or not is hard to tell this early on, but the government’s immediate willingness to accept the task force’s suggestions bodes well for the future. The task force also indicated it believes India can occupy a much larger portion of the global AVGC marketplace. Today, India accounts for 1% of that market. Task force representatives believe that by 2030 that number could be as high as 6%.