Mumbai, October 8, 2025: It’s my incredible privilege to be here today. And a big thank you to FICCI Frames for having me here to deliver this address. The topic for today is regulating the orange economy, our creative universe. And it’s not a new one. But it’s certainly far more central today than it has ever been before. In a word, where globalisation seems to be slipping. Cross border access is increasingly constrained by geopolitical currents. Supply chains are fragile, and regulations go beyond any one company or person’s control. This is truly a difficult and challenging time. India’s media and entertainment sector today is almost worth 30 billion is contributing around 0.7% of our GDP: And it’s projected to grow at 7 to 8% annually. But nearly all of this is just domestic demand. So the question before us today is what is it that it will take to grow this astronomically? Where and how will the next big league come from?
So 2 simple provocations here for me to frame this conversation for today.
- What is it that is stopping us from birthing and at scale, content demo? The Airtel or IPL of the entertainment world. Something to the word, something truly global in its quality and scale, but births in India, anchored in our stories.
- How do we build an institution framework that scales private investments into content, in an unprecedented way, in the same way that has happened in other Indian industries like Parma or the IT services boom that we saw a couple of decades ago? What will it take to truly create a huge volley of content investments that can fuel creativity in every major Indian language?
So simply put, how is it that we can create a silicon valley of creativity in India? Indian content has seen 3 great inflection points in the last 25 years. This century. which was the 1st KBC launched at the turn of the century. First time, anywhere in the world that a big game show had Bollywood superstar as its face. The 2nd was, of course, IPL itself, 2008. Cricket, 1st time ever, became suiting family entertainment. And 3rd is the way of pan India television and films, anchored in shows like Satyamev Jayate and Anupama, and films like Baahubali. Now the problem is that the last of these big, noteworthy innovations happened 10 years ago.
So, for the last decade, we have been waiting for the next big league in massive scale innovation that fans will truly root for and love. So why has this weight gone on for this long? And what is it that we can do sitting here in this room as we lead different companies to stop this, to bring in more change and at a way faster than ever before?
The 1st big part I feel for us is we need to be aggregating human capital. In his new book, the New Geography of Jobs, Enrico Moretti argues that how prosperous a region is, is increasingly, today, determined by innovation driven industries and human capital. Regions that can attract and retain skilled workers, research activity, and high-tech a knowledge-based firms become prosperous herbs, like in the Silicon Valley. Now the closest Indian model that I can think of, where truly human capital has been aggregated. And a centre of excellence has got created. Is the Indian Premier League? This IPL has created, firstly, a strong talent pipeline. local leagues, state level leagues, under 19 teams, talent scouts, all of it in the service of building a great talent pipeline, and therefore every game in the IPL has a range of teams brimming with high quality cricketers. Every season has at least 6 new names that a cricket fanatic like me has never heard of before.
Now this is years around engagement, global talent scouts going too far and away places, looking for extraordinary talent, and then tons of money being thrown in to make them better to get them to be truly world class. This is the kind of ecosystem we need that will reach the most rooted, most authentic storytellers, and enable them to craft stories which are good enough for the world. As a nation of 1.4 billion people possessing the world’s deepest, most vibrant, and diverse cultural reservoir, our films, our music, and our digital creators should be watched, share, and celebrated globally. We need to create an ecosystem today that identifies and nurtures this style. And that’s where India’s answer to Squid Game, or the next Lagaan, still here and goes and gets an Oscar nomination, will get created.
We don’t have to wait decades for the next lagan or for the next Baahubali. It should be happening every year. That’s the scale of people that’s a scale of time that this country possesses. And if we build the right ecosystems of time, we can get this done and there are now within our own country, some incredible examples of this. The Malayalam film industry, certainly what they have created in the last half decade is one such. Just this last weekend, I had the privilege of watching Lokah chapter one. No film has enthralled me as much as this film did after Baahubali. And it’s not just about me and my creative pursuits. I am told that a movie that costs less than 30 cr has already done today a box office of over 300 cr. That is the kind of audience, that’s the kind of commercial success that’s possible. And Lokah is not alone. It just comes on the back of string of great films. You know, you’ve had Aavesham before that, you were 2018, you’ve had Manjummel Boys.
Every year there are at least 2-3 such films that have been building up for a very long time and Lokah is just one more chapter in the evolution of a great ecosystem that has got baked. And now the question is, how many more such can we build over the next few years? And therefore a few steps we could be taking now to build this and grow this faster.
First, we need to build creative institutions and centres of excellence that nurture talent. This means building institutions, recruitment pipelines, scouting organisations that bring the best of the best, and some effort the government have been started making in this direction, which is fantastic.
Second, we need to be building creative firms in close collaboration with these centres. There needs to be a continuous dialogue and a lot of deep participation between great centres of academic excellence and great businesses. And in India, we have to build that tradition. If there is Stanford University, that has to be built 1st and Silicon Valley will follow. And I think in India, we need to be building these connections very, very strongly.
To summarise creative industries are no longer peripheral. They need to be central. They generate jobs, they fuel innovation, they export identity and imagination. And they amplify India’s soft power. If India has to write the next chapter of global leadership, we must rely on creativity and technology both. We invest in creativity with the same boldness and vision that we are now beginning to invest around new technologies.
So, I invite you, policymakers, media leaders, and creators, to champion this agenda, to push boldly for reform, be experimental and open-minded around regulation. And let’s think truly global in ambition. Let us together ensure that India has created economy, does not sit at the margins of policy, but stands as the very heart of our world story.
