THE BET ON ORANGE REVOLUTION

FOR decades, India’s economic script revolved around steel, silicon and seeds.

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We measured our progress by the length of our highways, tonnage of our wheat and volume of our software exports. But the 2026-27 Union Budget signals a new hue in India’s growth imagination: the ‘orange economy’. Coined by the Inter-American Development Bank, the term refers to industries where creativity, culture and intellectual property generate economic value.

In her Budget speech, Nirmala Sitharaman did more than celebrate culture as soft power; she positioned it as hard economics. With India’s media and entertainment sector valued at %2.87 trillion ($35 billion) in 2026, storytelling is fast becoming a strategic asset class.

India’s services sector has long been a high-growth anchor, but the traditional IT and business process management model is maturing. Sustaining 7-8 percent GDP growth requires a new frontier. The creative economy—already estimated to contribute roughly 8 percent of India’s workforce, compared to 2.1 percent in Australia and 1.9 percent in South Korea—may well be it.

The Budget’s focus on the sector comprising animation, visual effects (VFX), gaming, comics and extended reality acknowledges how the digital generation earns. A VFX artist in Pune or a game designer in Hyderabad now matters as much to exports as a coder in Bengaluru. Creative services exports rose 20 percent last fiscal, diversifying foreign exchange earnings beyond maintenance and support work. Further, the projection that the sector will require 20 lakh professionals by 2030 has to be read for what it truly is—less of a statistic and more a skilling mandate.