A top commerce ministry official Thursday called for devising a concrete plan to increase exports from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to USD 10 billion in the next five years. “As one of the champion sectors supported by the Government of India, the Indian media and entertainment industry has a huge room for growth and should target a potential export growth of USD 10 billion from the current USD 1 billion,” Sudhanshu Pandey, additional secretary, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, said. He was addressing the 7th edition of the CII Big Picture Summit here.
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“We need to reflect on how do we grow our export pie of the audio visual sector from USD 1 billion (from the total Indian exports of USD 200 billion) to USD 10 billion in the next few years,” he said.
Currently, India is ranked fourth in the global audio-visual exports in the world.
Pandey also emphasised on the importance of intellectual property rights (IPRs), which is key to the growth of the M&E sector. He cited the example of the US, where the IPR industry contributes USD 6 trillion (38 per cent of total GDP) to the economy. The additional secretary said that the Indian M&E industry needs to drive IPR intensive industry, as this would safeguard against infringement of originality and creativity of the makers, thereby giving them the due credit.