Budget 2026–27 places AVGC on the national skilling map, but outcomes hinge on stackable learning and industry-validated talent pipelines
Image Source: Getty Images
Budget 2026–27 has placed India’s ‘Orange Economy’ covering creative industries, including traditional performing arts and new media sectors, firmly within the education-and-skilling agenda, by concretely proposing Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics (AVGC) Content Creator Labs in 15,000 secondary schools and 5,000 colleges, supported through the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT), Mumbai. The Finance Minister (FM) Nirmala Sitharaman, in her speech, explicitly framed AVGC as a growing industry with a workforce requirement of two million professionals by 2030, which is too large to be met by a small number of specialised institutes alone.
The bulk of sustainable livelihoods in the orange economy lies in skill-intensive production roles such as animation pipelines, game development, visual effects, sound design, asset creation, and post-production, which require disciplined skill development and professional practice.
Economic Survey 2025–26 also discussed the orange economy as a non-traditional growth lever, which is underdeveloped in India but ripe for scale-up, given its youth population, growth in urban clusters, and rise of digital platforms and streaming services. This public investment in content-creator labs is not about encouraging casual gaming, platform-driven virality, or influencer-style success as the primary pathway for young people. The bulk of sustainable livelihoods in the orange economy lies in skill-intensive production roles such as animation pipelines, game development, visual effects, sound design, asset creation, and post-production, which require disciplined skill development and professional practice. The policy intent, therefore, is to orient learners towards production capabilities, portfolios, and market-relevant skills, not towards algorithm-dependent or highly volatile income models.
Globally, the creative economy has moved from a ‘soft’ sector to a measurable driver of jobs, exports and services growth. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)’s biennial report, Creative Economy Outlook 2024, notes that creative services exports reached about US$ 1.4 trillion in 2022, while creative goods exports were about US$ 713 billion, demonstrating that the sector is closely tied to trade and productivity, not just cultural expression. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that cultural and creative industries (CCIs) contribute 6.2 percent of global employment, with significant potential in developing countries, making them particularly relevant for youth employment.
In India, the creative industry is estimated to be at INR 3,01,245 crore (US$ 35 billion), with creative exports generating over INR 94,677 crore (US$ 11 billion) in 2023 alone. It contributes approximately 8 percent of the country’s employment, offers relatively well-paid jobs and accounts for 20 percent of the nation’s overall Gross Value Added (GVA). The orange economy sectors employ more people from disadvantaged populations, such as women, marginalised groups, and informal workers. Moreover, it can help countries sustainably diversify their economies through their dynamic intellectual assets, without consuming natural resources. Creative industries are also more resilient to shocks, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, when creative platforms and services remained central to social engagement amid periods of isolation.
Orange jobs, therefore, are among the most rapidly growing sectors and an emerging dynamic part of future work.
Orange jobs, therefore, are among the most rapidly growing sectors and an emerging dynamic part of future work. Recognising this, the Budget frames AVGC not as a niche but as part of a broader human-capital strategy by investing in education that connects global value chains.
The Government has positioned IICT as a national hub for creative technologies under a PPP model, with a stated allocation and institutional intent. Targeting 15,000 schools indicates that the government is attempting to create a broad foundational layer aimed at:
This is significant, as many young people are interested in creative sectors, but are constrained by a lack of structured, scalable skill formation in AVGC.
The inclusion of 5,000 colleges to build advanced AVGC skills is arguably the more consequential move, creating a bridge between exposure and employability. By targeting colleges, the Budget implicitly recognises that creative skills must translate into industry-ready competencies, and that colleges are the natural sites for learning advanced skills, creating portfolios, and applying those skills through internships and apprenticeships. The scale of 5,000 colleges allows for the creation of regional creative clusters, enabling peer learning, industry linkage, and shared infrastructure, something a handful of centres of excellence cannot achieve.
The inclusion of 5,000 colleges to build advanced AVGC skills is arguably the more consequential move, creating a bridge between exposure and employability.
However, whether these schools and colleges will become vibrant talent pipelines or underutilised labs will depend on curriculum clarity, teacher capacity, industry incentives, and sustained funding beyond the initial set-up. The next section offers some recommendations which can support budget provisions to usher in a long-horizon human-capital reform.
If the budget’s AVGC initiative is to meaningfully build human capital, the three follow-up steps are critical:
Talent pipelines as a supply-side strategy are necessary, but intellectual property (IP)-led sectors like AVGC also need demand and risk-side instruments. The budget does not announce any targeted tax credits for original content studios, grant frameworks for early-stage IP development, with limited relief on platform-related tax burdens, and little distribution-linked support for Indian-origin content. Countries that have successfully built creative IP ecosystems, such as South Korea in gaming and animation, Japan in anime and character-driven content, and Canada in screen-based industries, have combined skills development with public funding, tax incentives, and export support that reduce early-stage risk and reward ownership. India’s AVGC strategy will similarly need to evolve to combine a human-capital supply approach with an IP-led growth framework if creative skills are to translate into durable economic value and global cultural presence.
Budget 2026–27’s proposal is an important shift in treating the orange economy as a mass human-capital project, not merely an interest-based gig pursuit or a startup story. But scale will only matter if the programme is designed around the real constraints: teachers, curriculum specificity, portfolio-based assessment, and industry-linked pathways.
Well-designed creative-tech modules, based on the National Education Policy’s experiential and multidisciplinary pedagogy, can improve school relevance for many students — particularly when combined with local industry and freelance work opportunities. If executed well, the AVGC push can become a template for how emerging sectors are embedded into mainstream education and human-capital policy.
Arpan Tulsyan is a Senior Fellow with the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy at the Observer Research Foundation.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
Arpan Tulsyan is a Senior Fellow at ORF’s Centre for New Economic Diplomacy (CNED). With 16 years of experience in development research and policy advocacy, Arpan ...
Read More +
PREV
