How The Government Wants To Support The Entertainment Industry

The media and entertainment industry in India has seen a growth of 20 per cent in 2022, reaching a remarkable figure of $26 billion. The world is interested in Indian stories and culture, something which has been proved time and again, most recently though the two splendid Oscar wins and the content on OTT which is being lapped up by audiences the world over. In this scenario, the government aims at being facilitators and supporters of the industry, not regulators, so that it grows to world scale and not regulators, Apurva Chandra, Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting said at the sidelines of an event recently.

Chandra also said that the reality is that we need to grow to a world scale, for which the two constraints being faced are in the form of manpower and infrastructure. “We would like to work along with the industry to set up more and more institutes so that more and more manpower comes on board. There is a lack of manpower, one reason being because content creation has grown over the last three years since the pandemic. How do we get our young people to be trained into areas where the industry needs? For that, last year we created the AVGC (Animation, VFX, Gaming and Comic Policy) task force,” he said during his speech at the FICCI Frames convention.

Working right from the school level into skilling children and in the curriculum introduced courses for animation. Through computer courses and various other ways, they can grow up into creators of stories in animation and visual events.

Regarding the film heritage mission he informed that they have already given out all the contracts, awarding more than 500 INR crores worth and the work is going on at a fast pace. “We have a target of digitizing 5100 reels of which 2435 are feature films and 2760 are shorts. Already till now about 1400 films and 1100 shorts have already been digitized. We have arrived at this number of films and shots after going through a rigorous process of committees, national awards and what we feel is important for heritage preservation,” Chandra said.

Suggesting a new plan, he also pointed out that there are still a number of films and shorts which have been left behind and a program could be launched where fans come up and say that ‘I’m a fan of this film and this should be restored’ which will involve them paying for it too, where the people and fans pay for a film.