At the WAVES 2025 Summit, Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi emphasized the Orange Economy as a strategic cornerstone of India’s future. Involving industries that derive their value from ideas, creativity, culture, and intellectual property (IP), the Orange Economy is a conceptual shift in the way countries create growth and impact. For India, the country blessed with a civilizational heritage and possessing a young, digital-native population, this offers a chance not only for economic growth but also for projecting soft power.
Understanding the Orange Economy
The phrase “Orange Economy,” popularized by Felipe Buitrago and Iván Duque Márquez, describes industries based on human creativity and intellectual effort, including design, music, gaming, fashion, animation, architecture, film, advertising, and digital media. Such industries require fewer physical assets and increasingly rely on cultural capital, innovation, and narrative.
The creative economy globally is worth more than USD 2.25 trillion and comprises around 30 million people, as per UNCTAD. In India, the sector has been progressively gaining momentum. As per the FICCI-EY Media & Entertainment Report 2025, the sector alone was worth USD 28 billion in 2025 and is estimated to reach USD 100 billion by 2030, led primarily by digital content, gaming, and animation.
India’s creative economy had 8 million people working for it in 2021 and can create another 5–7 million jobs by 2030 with the right policies. With minimal capital outlays and high export demand, such industries provide decentralised growth prospects for both urban and rural India.
Culture to Commerce: Economic Value and Employment
The financial presence of the Orange Economy is expanding, especially in industries like gaming, animation, and AVGC-XR (Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, Comics and Extended Reality). India’s gaming industry alone reached over ₹16,000 crore (~USD 2 billion) in revenues annually in 2023, with an expected 15% CAGR and an active consumer base of more than 500 million.
The AVGC-XR industry, aided by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, has become an export-sector earner, expected to exceed ₹23,000 crore by 2025. These industries also embody a talent-driven model of growth, providing jobs in design, programming, voiceovers, storytelling, and content localisation.
Furthermore, the interactive nature of digital platforms enables creators from Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns to reach global audiences. A video game developer in Meghalaya, a fashion designer in Jaipur, or an animator in Kochi can now access global marketplaces that had hitherto been unaffordable.
From IT Services to IP Ownership
India’s historical strength has been in IT services, offering backend support to international companies. That is changing, though. The next economic frontier is IP ownership, and the Orange Economy is at the forefront of this movement.
Over 82,000 patent applications were filed with the Indian Patent Office in 2023-24, a year-on-year growth of 15.7%, reported by DPIIT. Even more significantly, applications from startups and MSMEs increased 310% over five years, from 1,492 in 2018-19 to 6,120 in 2023-24.
Concurrently, the startup ecosystem in India is coming of age. As of May 2025, 159,000 startups have been identified by DPIIT in 763 districts, which have created 1.7 million direct employment opportunities. More than 40% of these startups are in creative-tech, edtech, gaming, and digital services, under the umbrella of Orange Economy.
Cultural Capital and Global Visibility
Aside from economic indicators, the Orange Economy provides strategic advantages through cultural content export. Gaming, animation, and digital storytelling have become contemporary carriers of soft power. Indian mythology, local history, and folk practices, when digitally reinterpreted, can influence the world, as anime positioned Japan and K-pop positioned South Korea on the global map.
An increasing interest in Indian stories and narratives also reflects a change in the way content is consumed globally. Whether through Ramayana-based mobile games, virtual reality simulations of India’s freedom movement, or fashion technology products that have their origins in local textiles, the Orange Economy enables India to create its vision and narrate its own stories.
Challenges and the Policy Imperative
Albeit promising, the Orange Economy has its teething problems. Regulator uncertainty, especially when it comes to online gaming, tends to mix up legitimate entertainment offerings with criminal websites. In addition, the availability of early-stage capital, incubation facilities, and IP education is still limited, primarily beyond metro areas.
To help the industry achieve its full potential, a holistic policy framework is imperative, one that guarantees:
- Proper regulatory demarcation between gaming and betting.
- Stiffer IP protection and enforcement of copyrights.
- Incubators and accelerators within creative hotspots.
- Content rating systems and consumer protection.
- Grant schemes for culture-centric digital content.
The government’s AVGC Task Force proposals and initiatives under the National Creators Programme provide a beginning, however, long-term momentum will take both public and private sector initiatives.
Looking Ahead
India stands at a pivotal juncture. As international economies are shifting from information and manufacturing to imagination and innovation, the Orange Economy provides India with an opportunity to take the lead, not through imitating others, but through leveraging its own creative conscience.
The Prime Minister’s words at WAVES 2025 were more than symbolic, they were a policy nudge. If strategically supported, the Orange Economy has the potential to take India not just from being the global IT services provider to its IP powerhouse, but, ultimately, its creative capital.
This is not a tale of an industry alone. It is a declaration of national ambition.
