Cultural, creative economy employs 57 million people

As GenAI disrupts creative industry, ICRIER study calls for safeguards, protection India’s cultural and creative sector added over 16 million jobs between 2017-18 and 2025, a 40 per cent increase that brought the total workforce in this space to about 57 million, according to a paper published by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER).

With generative AI transforming creative industries, the paper urged the government to adopt a comprehensive strategy to protect livelihoods, safeguard creators’ rights and help workers benefit from technological change.

“This should include strengthening copyright and intellectual property frameworks to ensure transparency, consent, attribution and fair compensation when creative works are used to train AI systems,” it said. It wanted the government to support activities that sustain demand for human creativity.

The paper, claimed to be the first systematic estimate of employment in India’s cultural and creative economy, flagged the concentration of jobs in low-value manufacturing, stagnant real wages for women and gaps in intellectual property protection that leave traditional crafts vulnerable to commercial appropriation.

“It also makes the culture-creative sector among the top employers in the Indian economy, particularly in urban areas,” the paper said. The sector accounts for nearly 9 per cent of India’s total workforce and 16.7 per cent of urban employment.

The number of women employed more than doubled over this period, rising from 9.2 million in 2017-18 to 18.8 million in 2025, with female employment share expanding across every stage of the sector. The sector also remains geographically concentrated.

Nearly half the workforce is located in five states. Uttar Pradesh accounts for 12 per cent of the workforce, followed by West Bengal (9.8 per cent), Maharashtra (9.2 per cent), Tamil Nadu (9 per cent), and Gujarat (8.3 per cent).

The sector also saw a slight increase of 5.6 per cent in the overall real wages paid per day between 2017-18 and 2025. This increase was driven mainly by higher real daily wages for men in the cultural-creative sector, while real wages for women remained largely stagnant.

The paper said this widened the existing gender wage gap and called for targeted measures to address wage disparities. The paper called for a Cultural Satellite Account, a dedicated statistical framework to measure the sector’s contribution to national income and employment.

It also suggested formally recognising cultural enterprises under a separate industrial and startup classification, separate from generic MSME (micro, small and medium enterprises) frameworks, to enable targeted credit, incentives, and regulatory instruments tailored to their specific needs.

“Shifting this balance requires a national creative workforce skilling programme and fiscal incentives for enterprises in design, animation and audio-visual production,” it suggested. It also called for dedicated credit facilities, including collateral-free lending for women-led cultural enterprises.