5 min readFeb 26, 2026 11:48 AM IST
First published on: Feb 26, 2026 at 11:48 AM IST
Creative industries, especially animation, visual effects, gaming, comics, and the wider creator economy, have featured in policy conversations before, but this year’s Union Budget has offered a revealing glimpse into how the state is rethinking the future of work. The proposal to set up animation, visual effects, gaming, and comics (AVGC) labs across 15,000 schools and 500 colleges, alongside skilling pathways, signals an operational shift. Backed by projections that the sector could generate nearly two million jobs by 2030, the scale of the state’s expectations and the stakes attached to them become clear.
It is an ambitious bet. India’s digital consumption is rising, gaming and animation markets are expanding, and global demand for VFX and post-production continues to grow. The “orange economy” is now being seen as a driver of services-led growth, with the potential to generate intellectual property, exports, and new livelihoods. Yet, the shift also invites a closer look at the nature of the jobs being imagined, and at how stable or sustainable they are likely to be.
Large employment projections often aggregate very different forms of work — studio employment, contract production, freelance assignments, and platform-based monetisation. Treating these as equivalent risks blurring the distinction between stable employment and gig-based creative labour. The debate is shifting from whether jobs will exist to what qualifies as a “job” in the first place.
India already offers a preview of this transformation. The country has an estimated 12–15 million freelancers, and the gig workforce is expected to grow sharply over the next decade. Yet, income stability remains uneven. The Economic Survey 2025–26 notes that nearly 40 per cent of gig workers earn less than Rs 15,000 a month, highlighting how expansion in numbers does not necessarily translate into economic security. Creative labour sits squarely within this evolving landscape.
In animation, design, and digital video production, employment is increasingly project-based. Hiring surges during production cycles and slows between projects. Freelance editors, animators, and designers move from assignment to assignment, often without long-term contracts, benefits, or predictable income. Work exists, but careers remain fragmented.
The creator economy deepens this pattern. It is often presented as a democratic ecosystem in which talent and connectivity can generate livelihoods. In practice, it is governed by algorithms, platform incentives, and uneven monetisation. In India, despite millions identifying as creators, barely 8–10 per cent monetise effectively, pointing to a large gap between visibility and viable income. Platforms act as invisible employers — setting rules, determining reach, and influencing income without carrying the responsibilities associated with formal employment.
Globally, the past year has seen layoffs across major gaming studios, contraction in parts of the VFX industry, and ongoing labour unrest in creative sectors. The Hollywood writers’ (WGA) and actors’ (SAG-AFTRA) strikes, triggered by concerns over streaming economics and AI-led displacement, revealed how even advanced entertainment economies are struggling to stabilise creative labour. India’s creator economy is emerging within the same platform-driven global structure. The state is no longer speaking of jobs in the conventional sense. Skilling is presented as empowerment, but it also transfers the risks of an unstable labour market onto the worker.
India has encountered similar moments before. The expansion of engineering and management education created a large pool of trained youth, but employment did not always grow at the same pace. “Employability” emerged as a policy response to this gap between training and absorption. The AVGC push could face a comparable challenge.
For the employment projections to hold, growth will need to be anchored in production as much as in training through stronger studio ecosystems, domestic intellectual property, financing pipelines, and export linkages. Outsourcing cannot substitute for a broad-based production economy. Nor can platform-led creator work, on its own, provide the institutional stability that large-scale employment requires. Who owns the intellectual property created by this workforce — studios, platforms, or creators themselves — will also shape whether this ecosystem produces livelihoods or only labour.
None of this diminishes the importance of investing in the creative economy. India’s demographic advantage, digital infrastructure, and cultural diversity give it a real opportunity to lead in animation, gaming, and digital storytelling. But ambition must be accompanied by institutional design. If millions are trained for creative work, the next step is to address where they will work, under what conditions, and with what protections. The success of this policy push will depend less on the scale of training and more on the strength of the employment structures that follow.
The writer is assistant film research officer, Film & Television Institute of India, Pune. Views are personal
