New pathways for India's creative economy

The Hindu

21-04-2025

Few countries have a unique history of innovations and creativity that changed the world. Yet, India's tryst with creativity and innovation ranges from the arts to science, from metallurgy to medicine, from astronomy and much more. As India works towards becoming a $5 trillion economy, it needs to rejig its approach to innovations, supported by creativity at all levels.
Globally, in 2022, exports of creative services surged to $1.4 trillion, marking a 29% increase since 2017. Creative goods exports also experienced a 19% rise, reaching $713 billion. Collectively, the creative economy generates annual revenues exceeding $2 trillion and supports nearly 50 million jobs worldwide.
According to the United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report on the creative economy, Creative Economy Outlook 2024, three sectors are the main contributors of the creative economy (2022): software services (41.3%), research and development (30.7%), advertising, market research and architecture (15.5%).
India's creative economy has also demonstrated significant contributions. In 2019, creative goods and services exports totalled about $121 billion, with creative services accounting for nearly $100 billion. The design segment alone represented 87.5% of creative goods exports, while arts and crafts contributed around 9%.
As of 2024, India's creative industry is valued at $30 billion and employs about 8% of the country's working population. Creative exports grew by 20% in the previous year, generating more than $11 billion.
Creativity in creative economy
While investments into traditional creative economic sectors are booming in a country such as India, we still need to explore ways of being more creative and innovative to take the economic gains to new horizons, especially at the grass-root levels. This will ensure that such creations and innovations help local people. This will be a disruptive approach to promoting local economies.
Research has shown that creativity can be segmented into four types: deliberate and emotional; deliberate and cognitive; spontaneous and emotional, and spontaneous and cognitive. Creativity can be endogenous — triggered by one's own thoughts or imagination or exogenous — that is externally induced. It can be manifested concurrently or only episodically such as in crises or extreme climate events.
A significant part of local innovations falls into deliberate and cognitive as well as the spontaneous and cognitive segments.
Creativity precedes innovation. While creativity can be individual-based, innovation can be bootstrapped but needs an institution to support its scale or formalisation.
In a country such as India, enormous creativity exists but such creativity is not translated into innovation many a time. Creators come up with ideas while innovators translate the ideas into products and services. We need investments to bridge the gap between creativity and innovation.
Pioneering work on identifying and recognising grassroot innovations by organisations such as the Grassroot Innovations Augmentation Network (GIAN) have resulted in popularising hundreds of grassroot creative ideas.
An example from Indonesia
Where does one start? Consider a pioneering creative solution, the Antrodam Project, that has been conceived by the students of Binus School in Bekasi, Indonesia.
The Antrodam Project began with one mission: to create a solution to flooding, a challenge that affects communities worldwide. Looking for ideas from the best source of inspiration, nature itself, the Binus team explored structures from the animal and plant kingdoms to find the perfect design.
Inspired by the nests of Indian Harvester ants, the students engineered a flood protection system that works with nature rather than against it. The ants have intricate tunnel systems that direct water away from their nests, keeping them safe and dry. The students were also inspired by natural structures such as 'rose petals and their layered design to direct water; the lettuce leaf coral, with its intricate branching; the giant pill millipede which can roll into a compact shape; and the male frigate bird, known for its large, water-resistant throat pouch'.
This is sheer creative brilliance but what we now need are investments to scale up these creative ideas into an innovation at scale that can be applied elsewhere.
Take some examples of creativity from India such as the 'mitti cool clay refrigerator', pedal-operated washing machines or the amphibious bicycle. Each needs scale-up to be commercially attractive with appropriate protection for the creative idea, design and application.
Investing in creativity and innovation
It is time that India invests more in creative pursuits at all levels — grassroots to technology-intensive ideas. Grassroot innovations need more investments to ensure the proof of concept demonstrated is supported by capital investments.
The innovation and associated intellectual property protection for such innovations, including informal ones, need better protection through adjustments to Indian intellectual property protection policies and regulations.
It is also time that the government invests in 'one district one innovation' modelled after the successful initiative of 'one district one product' initiative.
While the climate tech sector in India received $2,853 million in 2023, the investments that grassroots creativity received seems to be very poor. Even if a small percentage of investments go to climate adaptation and mitigation actions that are creative and not working at the local level, India's ability to deal with climate change will be many times more.
What we need today is an ecosystem that balances creativity and innovations at all levels, backed by investments to ensure that India's ambitions to improve creative economic conditions are met.
Balakrishna Pisupati is the Country Head of the United Nations Environment Programme, India, and a member of Team UN India