Creative India: Exploring the Full Potential of the Creative Economy

Author: Prateek Kukreja, Havishaye Puri, Dil B. Rahut [ADBI Working Papers]·16 Sep 2025

Topics

Creative Careers

Digital Futures

Financial Management

Legal and Policy

Planning and Governance

This study, which forms a part of the Asian Development Bank Institute’s Working Paper series, provides the first reliable measure on the size of India’s creative economy. It explores the many challenges faced by the creative industries, and provides recommendations to make India one of the most creative societies in the world. The study uses an occupation-based approach/methodology to arrive at the final creative employment estimates, by accounting for all creative occupations across all industry sectors of an economy (Cruz and Texeira 2013).

Key Findings

Between 2017–2018 and 2019–2020, average annual employment in India’s creative economy was around 39.73 million, accounting to about 8.30% of total employment in India during the period. This includes all three categories of workers: casual, regular salaried, and self-employed working in either the organised or the unorganised sector.
The contribution of the tertiary sector is the highest (50.73%), closely followed by the secondary sector (47.62%), whereas the primary sector’s contribution to creative employment is miniscule (1.65%).
Creative employment is more urban centric; a sizable 67.07% of all creative workers are in the urban areas, compared to merely 29.62% non-creative workers in the urban areas.
Out of the top ten creative districts in India, six are non-metros — indicating the diversity and depth of creativity across India.
The creative workforce has a lower gender pay gap than the non-creative workforce. Interestingly, within the Media, Entertainment, and Recreation industry group, female creative workers earn significantly higher than their male counterparts.
Key recommendations include:
Increase the recognition of Indian culture globally
Facilitate human capital development among its youth
Address the bottlenecks in the Intellectual Property (IP) framework
Improve access to finance
Streamline the process of policymaking by establishing one intermediary organisation