Measuring India’s Creative Economy

1. The aim of this study is to provide the first ever measure of the economic contribution of copyright relevant and related rights-relevant industries in India. The copyright-relevant industries are those defined by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as “activities or industries where copyright [and related rights] play an identifiable role”.

2. We adopted the methodology put forward in the WIPO (2015) Guide on surveying the economic contribution of copyright-related industries in India, which intends to maximise comparability with previous studies in other countries. We conduct the study for 2016-2017, which is the latest year where most of the required economic indicators are available at WIPO-defined industry categorisations.

3. Our primary data source is the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation (MOSPI), which gives comprehensive coverage of the manufacturing sector. We also aggregate company-level data from the Prowess database published by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy and use this to supplement the ASI data for industries outside of manufacturing. We include data from industry studies such as the FICCI-KPMG report and the survey by the media and entertainment industry Skills Council (MESC) to cover industries outside of manufacturing. For the exports and imports figures, we use the trade data published by the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCI&S), which gives a comprehensive value for all goods traded. We supplement the exports and imports figures with trade data from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on audio-visual services.

4. For the selection of industries to include, we used the WIPO guide. WIPO distinguishes four categories: Core Copyright Industries, Interdependent Copyright Industries, Partial Copyright Industries and Non-Dedicated Support Industries. In 2016-2017, the Core Copyright Industries accounted for 44.74% of the value added generated by Indian copyright-relevant industries. Similar to other countries, the Core Copyright industries have the highest share of value added across all copyright-related industries.

5. The economic contribution of Indian copyright-relevant industries has been measured using three indicators: the Gross Value Added (the value added to goods and services used in the production process), employment, and the balance of trade (exports minus imports). Data is taken for the most recent year available (2016-2017). Table 1 summarises our results.

6. The Gross Value Added (GVA) of copyright-relevant industries amounted to Rs. 888.89 Billion in 2016-2017, or 0.58% of the Indian Gross Domestic Product (GDP)3. The Central Statistical Office reports GVA by 2-digit industries, to which we cannot apply the WIPO methodology. Our calculations cannot include this data, making our overall calculation for GVA an underestimation. The international average from available WIPO studies from varying years is a contribution of 5.48% by mean and 4.83% by median. The share of GVA of creative industries in overall GDP is visibly less for India than that of other countries. This can be partially attributed to the lack of comprehensive GVA data outside of the formal manufacturing sector, but not entirely, as we describe in the next point.

7. As a benchmark, consider the share of creative economy in the partial and interdependent industries, which mainly come under manufacturing. We can compare this to total manufacturing GVA. The share is 2.97% of total manufacturing GVA, which is still lower than median and mean shares to GDP from other countries, globally as well as across Asia.

8. Employment in India’s copyright-relevant industries is approximately 1.1 million workers. The share to total employment cannot be calculated due to the absence of official employment data for 2016- 2017. However, we calculate the share of partial and interdependent industries to total manufacturing employment in a calculation similar to the one for GVA described above using the ASI manufacturing employment data. This gives a share of 2.72% of copyright-related employment in manufacturing. The average share of national employment in other countries equals 5.4%, once again suggesting that the low share of copyright-related industries can only be partially explained by the lack of data.

9. Employment elasticity is high at 0.87 for the set of copyright-relevant industries. The highest elasticity is for the partial copyright industries due to their high labour intensity.

10. Economic contribution was furthermore measured in terms of the trade balance, which equals exports minus imports. Note that this measure captures only goods traded and excludes copyright-related services. We also add in audio-visual services from the FICCI Frames report for 2016 as they are a large component, but data on other services are not available. India is a net exporter in the Core, Partial and Non-Dedicated Copyright industries, while it is a net importer in the Interdependent Copyright industries. Overall, copyright relevant industries had a deficit of USD 16.4 Billion in 2016-2017, while overall India ran a trade deficit. Note that using unweighted data, we would get a trade surplus of USD 34 billion. This divergence is due to several methodological concerns including the absence of trade data on services, the prescribed method for selection of weights, and the detail of HS product code selected.

11. Various methodological and data issues had to be resolved to finalise this study. There are minimal assumptions on industry mappings from the WIPO guide to India’s industry classification, which can often require assumptions for other countries. We make assumptions on assigning shares to narrow industries which overlap with each other, or report their data in an aggregated fashion. We also make simplifying assumptions on the weights or copyright factors, in the absence of firm survey and interview data. For the trade calculations, there is no reliable mapping between industry and product codes, so we matched these by description. Finally, we supplement core datasets with aggregate figures from company reports and industry reports for groups of narrow industries, in the absence of comprehensive data at the narrow industry level that the WIPO methodology requires.

12. For a richer estimate of the size of the copyright economy in India, our recommendation is for government agencies to produce an advanced version of this study. Access to data on GVA at the narrow industry level from the CSO will be necessary to estimating the contribution of copyrightrelated activities accurately. Trade data on services is crucial to capture the copyright economy for India. Estimates of employment from household and small enterprise surveys can be used to capture the informal sector.

13. Several qualitative aspects of the creative economy can also be included for better understanding of the creative economy. Periodic documentation of the copyright-relevant sectors can help understand trends. This study can be considered the first step towards measuring India’s creative economy.

14. The WIPO methodology is more amenable to developed country settings where almost all economic activity takes place in the formal sector. The informal economy remains out of scope in settings such as India. We recommend WIPO consider this in future versions of its guide.

Attribution: Dr. Megha Patnaik. “Measuring India’s Creative Economy,” Report No. 003, May 2020, Esya Centre.

Trends in Copyright Infringement and Enforcement in India

The World Intellectual Property Organisation describes copyright (or author’s right) as the rights that creators have over their literary or artistic works. Works covered by copyright range from books, music, paintings, sculpture, and films to computer programmes, databases, advertisements, maps, and technical drawings. In the first report in the series, we explored the changing role of IP rights globally, shaped by advancements in the digital era. We discussed how copyright has been elevated from being an ‘economic vehicle’ to ‘a communications instrument relevant to cultural policy.’ And how, therefore, copyright laws influence free expression, shape innovations in the digital cultural space, govern information flows, regulate the production and exchange of digital cultural products, and shape social relations of communication. Copyright law gives control to authors and subsequent owners. Thus, writers, artists, musicians, performers, software programmers, publishers, students, researchers, librarians, teachers, readers, movie-goers, and music fans amongst others, exist in a web of cultural and economic relations subject to copyright law. Copyright impacts the information and communication markets as well as culture around the world, its infringement can be seen as both a moral and an economic violation. With the proliferation of the Internet and internet devices, infringement has become seamless and at scale. This report explores the contours of digital copyright piracy and how it affects all kinds of expressions of ideas.

Industry Growth and Piracy

The debate over piracy, and whether it promotes or harms cultural consumption, remains unsettled. The rise of the digital medium for consuming content has added to industry growth but has also aided digital piracy. For instance, online streaming has emerged as the biggest contributor to music consumption. In india, as of December 2018, the value of the audio ott market was USD 250 million, and music consumption per week stood at 21.5 Hours versus a global average of 17.8 Hours..

Using music as a proxy for the content industries would demonstrate the potential of the digital market. Piracy has affected other digital media as well. Illegal streaming reportedly accounted for:

The Indian Context

The Indian creative industry (largely comprising the media and entertainment industry) is poised to be worth USD 31 billion by 20209 and is expected to create 1.3 million jobs by 2022.10 Although the Indian Government has identified the audiovisual sector as a ‘champion services sector’, much remains to be done to protect and promote investment and innovation in India’s creative economy. The growth of an innovative content ecosystem depends on a clear understanding of the market, the legislative and enforcement framework, and piracy’s technological underpinnings.

The first critical step is identifying why piracy takes place, and what makes India a particularly challenging market in this regard. A recent meta-study of the existing literature found that a predisposition towards digital piracy is influenced by several aspects: personality factors (self-control), personal or psychological factors (neutralisation techniques, attitudes and beliefs), and social and cultural factors (social learning, collectivistic/ individualistic factors). Other determinants included legislation, and efforts by industry, the judiciary, and policymakers to curb digital piracy.

The drivers of digital piracy in India specifically remain unaddressed in recent academic literature. There is no recent and reliable data on the total size or scope of the cultural economy in India, nor the scale and nature of copyright infringement. For instance, while WIPO has calculated the revenue, employment and net exports generated by the creative industries in a number of countries, such a study is yet to be conducted for India.

India presents a number of challenges in combating online piracy for multiple reasons: lack of uniform enforcement mechanisms, the fragmentation of supply chains in cultural industries, emerging business models, the rapid development of the OTT space requiring increased technological investments in media encryption and piracy monitoring, an overburdened judicial system lacking in specialised IP courts, and the absence of a widespread understanding of copyright, among other factors. Content owners thus need to additionally invest in media encryption and piracy monitoring services. Local industry continues to be dominated by promoters and family owned companies, therefore, governance structures tend to be informal, making industry organisation and policy advocacy more difficult.

Centralised and uniform enforcement strategies are difficult to implement in India. ‘Law and order’ is a state subject under the Seventh Schedule to the Constitution, so enforcement initiatives that rely on the police are organised at the state level rather than through any centralised agency with national jurisdiction, making it difficult for enforcement strategies to be implemented uniformly throughout.

In conversations with industry experts we discovered some unconventional factors (beyond pricing and availability) that shape the piracy industry in India. For instance, the factor of time or the ‘windowing’ period is critical to controlling piracy. The less time it takes for a theatrical release to find its way to a legal, more accessible digital medium like OTT, the less users’ predisposition to consume pirated content. In this context, a recent report mentioned that due to the threat of digital piracy across and between windows has prompted many TV copyright owners to shorten delays between releases to different segments of the market. In certain cases where there is a high risk of widespread piracy (e.g. the Game of Thrones series), some content suppliers have moved to a day-and-date approach in which material is released simultaneously across differing outlets and platforms worldwide.

Indeed, the use of OTT platforms has emerged as a strong anti-piracy measure, and with local and international content now available at lower prices on various OTT services, the piracy market in India is bound to undergo certain changes, given the variety of content (international and regional) offered by several legal online content platforms at affordable price points.

Method

This report combines desk-based analysis with semistructured interviews and discussions with practitioners and academic experts. It focuses primarily on the media and entertainment industries, given the availability of previously conducted research and data. It is also rooted in current and future trends, a review of global literature, and specific case studies. In its working paper format, the report was valuably informed by a focus group discussion among experts.

Attribution: Dr. Megha Patnaik, Shohini Sengupta and Aishwarya Giridhar. “Trends in Copyright Infringement and Enforcement in India,” Report No. 002, December 2019, Esya Centre.

Associated Videos:

Trends in Copyright Infringement and Enforcement in India

Economic Analysis of Piracy in the Indian Movie and Music Industry

Review of Copyright Legislation in India

Cross-border Copyright Infringement

Key Judicial Trends in Copyright Enforcement

Global Regulatory and Policy Best Practices

Extralegal Strategies and Soft Law Approaches

Contemporary Culture and IP: Establishing the Conceptual Framework

i. Context and Relevance

Successful digital transformation has been explained as “a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It’s still the same organism, but it now has superpowers.” This is perhaps the most apt way to contextualise the ongoing digital transformations in the formal and natural sciences, social sciences, art, and culture, enabled by new technologies.

Across the world, technological innovations are constantly creating new knowledge, improving access to information, and helping cultures evolve, with digital traces marking every human interaction in the digital space. Coupled with this is the fact that in the last five years, more than one billion people have become new Internet users, and digital connectivity has gone from being confined to economically prosperous parts of the globe, to reaching a majority of the world’s population.

In India, the digital transformation in the past few decades has upended the cultural space in a dramatic manner, engendering the need for new legal, economic, and technological responses. This churn has resulted in businesses investing in cultures of collaboration, in capturing volumes of data and enabling collaborative data sharing. It has also added to a more vibrant and mature ecosystem of customers and partners, and made agility and innovation the key goals of a new ‘digital culture’. In fact, new research suggests that by the year 2021, digital transformation will contribute an estimated US$154 billion to India’s GDP, and increase the growth rate by one percent annually. Interestingly, responses to an evolving digital culture are themselves in a state of flux, mandating reinvention and reimagination of existing frameworks of law, economics, and technology.

The evolution of culture has always been a product of constant borrowing and diffusion. Therefore, cultural systems are not discrete but a continuum, with cultural boundaries being fluid, and constantly shifting. As such, much of the predominant legal discourse reflects assumptions about cultural systems that are no longer accepted in disciplines such as anthropology and folklore. For instance, much of the IP discourse around the world is still struggling to deal with the legal concepts around cultural evolutions that have emerged as a result of creolisation. This is because conclusive legal discourses are unable to form around cultural products that are not “finished” products. Therefore, cultural boundaries blur and disappear, with native cultural entities combining, recombining, re-emerging, and creating cultural expressions that defy strict IP or legal concepts.

The challenges of a new digital environment make it imperative for scholarship in India to develop around new legal, economic, and technological frameworks. These frameworks must evolve to bring the fruits of the digital cultural space to people, while fostering innovation, competition, diversity and choice. Figure 1 gives a visual representation of the interactions between culture and IP.

Further, the role of cultural evolution and the correspondent development of IP doctrine and practice have long been shaped by evolutionary perspectives on human society. Much of the international IP frameworks that developed in the 19th century reflected the national systems of the countries at the negotiating table, and the values that they sought to advance or considered important. For instance, since this was the age of the industrial revolution, cultural production contained in local knowledge like folk music was treated as entirely appropriable knowledge, but not as valid systems in and of themselves. Therefore, local knowledge was not thought to be comparable to the products of industrialization. This is reflected in the way IP systems developed in many countries. For instance, although IP protection in many countries was extended to Geographical Indications, no protection was otherwise given to other forms of local knowledge, reflecting prevailing views concerning the devolution of folklore. Further, international IP frameworks also reflected the role of commercial interests of the countries that were deciding the international legal order.

Conversely, today, the identification of cultural evolution and its elements is fundamental to not just IP, but also other attendant policy choices and questions of economic and business value. This is especially since the operation of cultural resources as valuable assets cannot be denied in the contemporary context, given the business models of creative industries, even though there is still a gap between the development in culture and IP. The gap between culture and IP exists in India as well. For instance, because of copyright law being written with pre-digital technology in mind, artefacts of these assumptions continue in the law regardless of attempts to modernize it. In the EU, there have been significant debates over the new Copyright Directive, the ostensible purpose of which is to modernise copyright rules for the digital age across the region, including increased protections of digital works. In India, similar advances to modernise the Copyright Act, 1957 (Copyright Act) with a view to resolving the debates over increased protection of digital works, intermediary liabilities, and discourses over different approaches to dealing with infringements in the digital space are still evolving.

Further, there is a vacuum in multi-disciplinary research on culture and IP in developing countries as a whole. Most existing research has been focussed on the countries that are part of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development or the global ‘North’. As a result, there is little contextual development in the global south, and particularly in India, over how digital culture and IP interact with each other.

As such, this series will focus on the peculiarities of the Indian digital cultural ecosystem, primarily centred on three relevant stakeholders – users, businesses, and the Government, as detailed in Section 3. We believe that research focussed on the digital culture and IP in India will help all stakeholders in understanding and exploiting digital transformation more efficaciously. More importantly, understanding varying incentives can help stakeholders such as creators, producers, distributors, publishers, users, and policymakers identify common values, which in turn can define future standards in the digital space. To this extent, this series on ‘Contemporary Culture and IP’ will attempt to fill gaps in scholarship and raise foundational questions on law, economics, and policy issues of the future. This foundational paper aims to lay the foundations for future research and undertakes two interrelated tasks: (i) developing the taxonomy and foundational ideas for the series; and (ii) building the foundational frameworks on law and economics for the series to explore in depth, prospectively.

ii. Understanding what Contemporary Culture means for India

a. Understanding digital culture, and who shapes digital culture

Contemporary culture is rooted in the development of digital technologies, making these technologies both powerful catalysts, and sometimes the focal points of cultural change. The local digital ecosystem in India has burgeoned, leading to more virtualisation of group networks and social identities, and convergence of text and audio-visual media. The evolution of technology is in itself a reflexive process that responds to the evolving digital ecosystem consisting of creators, publishers, distributors, innovators, consumers and other stakeholders. While technology has always allowed stakeholders to respond to changes, the digital ecosystem has allowed the response time to decrease, such that stakeholders can now give their feedback almost immediately. For example, digital platforms and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook now allow citizens to communicate directly with politicians and Government institutions, as well as offering policymakers new channels to listen to and respond to the wider electorate.

Thus, technological and cultural evolution have become interdependent to the point where correlations between the two, and the boundaries between people and technological artefacts have become difficult to establish. Therefore, in the context of India, this series explores the local meaning and impact of digital culture on the three most prominent stakeholders - the users, the businesses, and the Government; and the relationship between new technologies and cultural innovation, and the latent possibilities for such stakeholders to gain from the digital cultural space. Section 3 will chart the reasons for selecting these three stakeholders, and their relationship with each other.

Therefore, a primary focus in this series will be to view these different incentives from an evolving lens, in an attempt to understand why incentives vary, the role of each stakeholder, and the future opportunities and challenges. The series will also explore new roles, and responsibilities for new stakeholders such as intermediary platforms.

b. Identifying relevant digital cultural norms and contexts for defining digital culture

The role of IP rights has gained significance in the digital era, shaping both cultural life, and the conditions of communication and information sharing. For instance, in the case of copyright, scholars have argued that it is not merely an “economic vehicle, but a communications instrument relevant to cultural policy.” Copyright laws of a particular country influence democratic expressions of free speech, shaping innovations in the digital cultural space, governing flows of information in the economy, regulating the production and exchange of digital cultural products like books, music, art, and movies; and shaping social relations of communication. Copyright law gives powers of control to authors and subsequent owners, and regulates the production and exchange of meaning and information. Thus, writers, artists, musicians, performers, software programmers, publishers, students, researchers, librarians, teachers, readers, movie-goers, and music fans among others, exist in a web of cultural relations subject to copyright law. However, in the digital world, copyright laws have also generated a new public idea of communication, participation and production, which favours a collaborative model of shared and cumulative cultural dialogue over a proprietary model of cultural production.

The development of digital cultural norms along with IP values play a critical role in defining each other’s scope. A key part of this series, therefore, will be to explore the relationship between digital cultural norms and IP, particularly in areas where there is significant public debate, and a lack of clear policy. For example, the series will explore public and cultural space occupied by intangible goods that currently lack IP protection, that is, ‘cultural commons’, particularly in the Indian context.

Today, due to commercial-technologies permeating citizens’ lives, including the way we access and consume information, we are far more familiar with the technological contexts of our culture. This familiarity with technology, for instance, in the use of smartphones and television screens, allows us to navigate evolving cultural norms even though the digital cultural space itself is constantly changing due to this participation. However, since the digital cultural space only started evolving a few decades ago, stakeholders cannot rely on any long-standing norms and rules for digital interactions of different kinds. Therefore, stakeholders will now have to develop new cultural norms and commonly shared values, collectively developing rules, depending on the role they play, and their incentives. An example where stakeholders have come together to do so effectively has been in addressing the issue of child pornography on the Internet, by developing a universally accepted norm of restricting child pornography in a digital cultural context.

The varying perspectives on the evolution of contemporary culture brings us to the understanding that there are two schools of thought in this regard - one that argues that the existing cultures might find themselves essentially recreated in digital form as more and more life experiences play out in digital spaces; and the other that argues that dominant digital culture emerging now is a separate culture unto itself. For this series, we understand the term ‘digital culture’ to mean an uncertain combination of both of these perspectives. We will attempt to capture a multi-dimensional, and context-specific understanding of digital culture in this series.

For the purpose of illustration, we present some of the relevant contexts in which digital culture can be understood:

a. The cultural influence of new media environments and the digitisation process that has aided in the development of new digital cultures in media;

b. The development of common values, agreements, and interactions of different stakeholders in the digital society, and the ways in which people, businesses and the Government communicate with each other;

c. The importance of using IP systems creatively and effectively to increase access, innovation and value generation in the digital ecosystem;

d. The values of building a cooperative shared economy, to own and govern the Internet differently in the digital age, to improve income distribution in cultural supply chains, and address the legacy of an informal workforce.

Attribution: Shohini Sengupta and Aishwarya Giridhar.“Contemporary Culture and IP: Establishing the Conceptual Framework,” Report No. 001, March 2019, Esya Centre.

A Survey-Based Assessment of the Impact of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act on Indian MSMEs and AI Innovation

Description: This report highlights how Sections 3(c)(ii) and 7 of India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) disrupt innovation, raise compliance costs, and render even routine tasks impossible for AI start-ups and small businesses in India. It provides empirical evidence based on a primary survey of 300 firms across major urban centers and Tier-2 cities. The survey assesses how restrictions on processing publicly available personal data under Section 3(c)(ii), and the omission of legitimate interest and contractual necessity from Section 7 affect businesses’ operations, investment plans, and innovation capacities.

Attribution: Meghna Bal, Shweta Venkatesan and Aaqib Qayoom, A Survey-Based Assessment of the Impact of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act on Indian MSMEs and AI Innovation, March 2026, Esya Centre.

An Empirical Assessment of Regulatory Design and Consumer Experience in Indian Broadcasting

Description: This report explores the disconnect between regulatory design and consumer satisfaction in the cable and satellite television broadcasting sector. Based on a survey of 2,037 households across 15 cities, the report examines how regulatory design, pricing architecture, and distribution dynamics impact consumer welfare and market outcomes in the broadcasting sector.

Attribution: Meghna Bal and Shweta Venkatesan, An Empirical Assessment of Regulatory Design and Consumer Experience in Indian Broadcasting, March 2026, Esya Centre.

The Impact of a Network Usage Fee on Consumers and the Digital Economy: An Empirical Evaluation

Description: This report presents a comprehensive assessment of the potential consequences of imposing traffic-based charges on digital services. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach, the study combines insights from 38 experts across public policy, academia, civil society and industry, along with a national survey of over 2,000 consumers across Tier I, II and III cities

It provides a comprehensive overview of the consequences associated with the imposition of network usage fees on CAPs in India.

Attribution: Meghna Bal, Dr Vikash Gautam, and Kunal Tyagi. The Impact of a Network Usage Fee on Consumers and the Digital Economy: An Empirical Evaluation. January 2026, Esya Centre.

A Survey Based Assessment of the Impact of Digital Competition Laws on the Internationalisation of MSMEs

Description: This report examines the extent to which Indian micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) rely on personalised advertising on large digital platforms such as social media, e-commerce, and search engines for their internationalisation. It also seeks to understand the impact any regulation or legislation can have on the internationalisation of MSMEs, if it restricts their ability to effectively offer personalised ads through these platforms

It provides empirical evidence based on a survey data of 102 MSMEs across India between November and December 2024.

Attribution: Tamanna Sharma, Meghna Bal, and Dr Vikash Gautam. A Survey Based Assessment Of The Impact Of Digital Competition Laws On The Internationalisation Of MSMEs. November 2025, Esya Centre.

An Empirical Appraisal of the Children’s Data Privacy Provisions in the DPDPA

Description: This report aims to understand the impact of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act’s (DPDPA’s) restrictions on the processing of children’s personal data. In particular, it focuses on three aspects – (i) the impact of the DPDPA’s verifiable parental consent (“VPC”) requirement on small businesses and children; (ii) the impact of the DPDPA’s restrictions on personalised digital experiences and content for children; and (iii) the impact of the DPDPA’s restrictions on targeted advertising on businesses that produce products and services for children, especially those that may be beneficial to children’s development.

Attribution: Shweta Venkatesan, Meghna Bal, and Vikash Gautam, An Empirical Appraisal of the Children’s Data Privacy Provisions in the DPDPA, September 2025, Esya Centre.

Sideloading: A National Security Threat

Description: Competition authorities, in India and across the globe, are increasingly proscribing sideloading. Sideloading entails downloading an application from outside the perimeter of a first-party app store, such as, the Apple AppStore or the Google Play Store.

In India, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs introduced the Draft Digital Competition Bill (DDCB) 2024. The DDCB introduces ex-ante obligations for large digital entities classified as “Systemically Significant Digital Enterprises” in the name of enhancing fairness and contestability. Section 13(a) of the Bill prohibits these entities from restricting or impeding the ability of users to download third-party applications or software. This means that even the warning shown to Android users about the risks of sideloading would not be permitted under this provision.

This report evaluates the security implications of enabling sideloading in the interest of promoting digital competition.

Attribution: Karnal Singh, Meghna Bal and Mohit Chawdhry. Sideloading: A National Security Threat. Issue No. 52, 2025, Esya Centre.

Dark Patterns in Indian Retail: An Empirical Examination

Description: This report explores the increasing use of dark patterns in India’s retail sector. India’s retail sector is a cornerstone of its economic growth, contributing Rs 20.18 lakh crore in Goods and Services Tax (GST) collections in FY 2024 and ranking among the top five start-up segments in the country. However, this sector is facing rising scrutiny for employing manipulative design tactics that undermine user autonomy.

This report finds that dark patterns are prevalent across both online and offline retail environments, though they are more readily identifiable in digital contexts. It critiques the disproportionate regulatory focus on e-commerce, noting that many of the flagged practices resemble long-standing marketing strategies. In this context, an ex-ante regulatory framework may not be appropriate for dark pattern regulation. 

The report recommends a reliance on a principles-based approach that emphasizes transparency and willful consent to safeguard consumer interest while mitigating the risk of harming innovation.

Attribution: Meghna Bal, Dr Vikash Gautam, and Tamanna Sharma. Dark Patterns in Indian Retail: An Empirical Examination, Issue No. 51, 2025, Esya Centre.

Assessing the Impact of the Draft Digital Competition Bill , 2024 on the Indian Economy

Description: This report analyses the economic impact of ex-ante competition regulation on digital markets in India. While digital markets share similarities with traditional markets, they possess distinct characteristics that have attracted the attention of antitrust regulators. Drawing on empirical research, the report assesses how a shift from ex-post to ex-ante regulation affects economic welfare indicators such as producer and consumer surplus, productivity, investment, and employment.

Attribution: Dr Vikash Gautam and Meghna Bal. Assessing the Impact of the Draft Digital Competition Bill, 2024 on the Indian Economy. Issue No. 50, 2025, Esya Centre.

Rethinking Data and Competition : A Critical Assessment of the Data-Driven Market Tipping Theory

Description: This paper focuses on data-driven network effects as a purported driver of tipping—namely, the theory that both direct and indirect network effects, fuelled by data accumulation, reduce the cost of innovation for first movers and enable them to entrench their market positions and monopolize digital ecosystems. It argues that while this theory is intuitively appealing, it rests on a narrow and increasingly outdated understanding of how data functions in digital markets. Its continued dominance in policy discourse risks misdiagnosing the sources of market power and incentivizing regulatory overreach. Instead, competition law frameworks must adopt a more nuanced, evidence-based approach—one that accounts for the fluidity, heterogeneity, and strategic deployment of data, rather than treating it as a static source of monopolistic power. By doing so, regulators can better distinguish between genuinely exclusionary conduct and competitive, innovation-driven behaviour in the digital economy.

Attribution: Meghna Bal, Shweta Venkatesan and Mohit Chawdhry, Rethinking Data and Competition: A Critical Assessment of The Data-Driven Market Tipping Theory, Issue No. 50, 2025, Esya Centre

Web 3.0 Gaming in Crypto and Fiat Arcade: A Token-based Market Assessment

Description: This report addresses important gaps in the understanding of W3G by examining its market characteristics, relationships with other financial instruments, and investment appeal. It analyses key aspects such as the factors driving user adoption of W3G – including play-to-earn (P2E) models, social engagement, and gaming environment interoperability – as well as the diverse monetisation strategies underpinning the W3G ecosystem. The report also evaluates the risk-return dynamics of W3G tokens in comparison to cryptoassets and fiat currencies.

Attribution: Dr. Vikash Gautam. Web 3.0 Gaming in Crypto and Fiat Arcade: A Token-based Market Assessment. Issue No. 049, February 2025, Esya Centre.

A Survey of Indian AI Start-ups in Agriculture: Opportunities, Challenges, and Recommendations for the Way Forward

Description: With agriculture supporting over 70% of rural households in India, AI-based agritech solutions have the potential to transform the sector by enhancing productivity, optimizing resources, and mitigating climate challenges. In this report, Meghna Bal, Mohit Chawdhry, and Akanksha Dutta explore how Indian AI agritech start-ups are pioneering solutions across the agricultural value chain, from soil health monitoring to livestock management and weather prediction.  The report provides insights from our survey of start-ups: AI-Genix International Pvt. Ltd, Areete.AI, Krisiyukta, and Digicrop Agriculture Solutions,  which are at the forefront of providing AI-driven agritech solutions.

Attribution: Meghna Bal, Mohit Chawdhry, and Akanksha Dutta. A Survey of Indian AI Start-ups in Agriculture: Opportunities, Challenges, and Recommendations for the Way Forward. Issue No. 048, January 2025, Esya Centre.

Drafting Standards for AI Systems: Critiques of International Approaches and Recommendations for India

Description: This report offers a detailed analysis of global AI governance standards, particularly the AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF) by NIST and ISO 42001:2023. It critiques these international frameworks for being overly generalized, focusing on their "one-framework-fits-all" approach, which may not adequately address the diverse applications and contexts of AI technologies. The report advocates for a tailored approach to AI governance in India, moving away from broad frameworks to more specific, context-driven standards.

Attribution: Meghna Bal. Drafting Standards for AI Systems: Critiques of International Approaches and Recommendations for India. October 2024, Esya Centre.

Towards a Stablecoin Regulatory Framework in India

Description: Stablecoins are a distinct class of virtual digital assets (VDAs) backed by fiat currencies, commodities, or other assets. They aim to maintain a stable value, thereby distinguishing them from other VDAs. The increasing prominence of stablecoins, especially in developing economies like India, necessitates the development of a balanced regulatory framework to leverage their potential while addressing associated risks. In light of the current absence of stablecoin-specific regulations in India, this document proposes a four-step process for developing a comprehensive regulatory framework.

Attribution: Mohit Chawdhry. Towards a Stablecoin Regulatory Framework in India. August 2024, Esya Centre.

User Engagement in Traditional Financial, Crypto, and Stablecoin Markets in India

Description: In recent years, several surveys have been conducted to understand the demographic characteristics of crypto-asset users and their motivations for adoption. However, a holistic assessment of user investment portfolios that encompass the various instruments in the crypto space, alongside traditional financial instruments, is lacking. This report attempts to fill this gap by analysing user engagement with assets like gold, equity/stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and cryptoassets of various types (i.e. unbacked cryptoassets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, nonfungible tokens or NFTs and stablecoins).

Attribution: Vikash Gautam. User Engagement in Traditional Financial, Crypto, and Stablecoin Markets in India. July 2024, Esya Centre.

A Survey-Based Assessment of the Draft Digital Competition Bill’s Impact on Consumer Welfare in Markets

Description: This report analyses the potential impact of the ex-ante regulation proposed in the Draft Digital Competition Bill, 2024 (DDCB) on consumers. It presents findings from a survey of 2,028 consumers from 28 Indian states we conducted in February and March 2024.

Attribution: Meghna Bal, Dr. Vikash Gautam, Tamanna Sharma, and Mohit Chawdhry, A Survey-Based Assessment of the Draft Digital Competition Bill’s Impact on Consumer Welfare in Markets. July 2024, Esya Centre.

Taxes and Takedowns: an Assessment of India’s Key Policy Tools for Virtual Digital Asset Markets

Description: This report examines the ecosystem impact of the blocking of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of nine foreign virtual digital asset (VDA) exchanges in January 2024. These exchanges saw large increases in trading volumes following the changes in the VDA tax architecture announced in the 2022-23 Union Budget. This report therefore examine whether the blocking managed to stem this offshoring, to assess its effectiveness as a policy lever to ensure compliance with local laws for areas like taxation and anti-money laundering.

Attribution: Dr. Vikash Gautam and Tamanna Sharma. Taxes And Takedowns: An Assessment Of India’s Key Policy Tools For Virtual Digital Asset Markets. Issue No. 042, May 2024, Esya Centre.

Literature Review on Gender Bias in Generative AI: Implications for India and Recommendations for the Way Forward

Description: Generative AI, known for its ability to generate new content and insights, is reshaping the landscape of human-computer interaction and decision making. Alongside its many benefits, however, generative AI presents unique challenges, particularly in terms of its differentiated impact on people of different genders. This paper seeks to understand how gender bias manifests across the value chain of generative AI, through a comprehensive review of academic work and reports by international organizations. It makes recommendations for policymakers, developers, and deployers for mitigating gender bias and reducing the bias-related harms that emanate from generative AI.

Attribution: Meghna Bal, Mohit Chawdhry and Noyanika Batta. A Literature Review on Gender Bias in Generative AI: Implications for India and Recommendations for the Way Forward. April 2024, Esya Centre.