A few months ago, a 22-year-old creator told us something that stuck. “I’m not chasing a job title. I want a space where I can build and keep evolving.” That line could well be the subtext of Budget 2026.
This year’s Budget is deliberate. It signals a shift from chasing scale alone to building capability at scale. For a cultural economy now shaped by reels, streams and prompts, the message is clear: India is designing the operating system for its next decade of cultural and economic growth.
Media and Entertainment: From Consumption to Creation at Population Scale
India’s media and entertainment story has crossed a tipping point. OTT is no longer niche. Gaming is no longer fringe. Content creation is no longer centralized.
The Budget’s push for the Orange Economy, especially the focus on Animation, Visual effects, Gaming and Comics (AVGC), is a recognition that storytelling today is as much about technology as it is about talent. With the AVGC sector projected to need 2 million professionals by 2030, the announcement to set up AVGC content creator labs across 15,000 schools and 500 colleges is transformative.
We are future-proofing culture by training creators early, locally and at scale.
Add to that the Khelo India Mission, which reframes sports as a media ecosystem rather than just a competitive one. Leagues, platforms, sports science, infrastructure, all of this feeds into content, fandom, communities, and monetisation. Today, sports are streamed, clipped, memed, gamified and sold.
This signals a deeper shift from India being a content consumption market to becoming a large-scale content creation and production economy. The Economic Survey reinforces this transition. Digital media now contributes nearly one-third of total M&E revenues, while video subscription revenues touched ₹9,200 crore in 2024. Gaming alone hit ₹232 billion, firmly establishing it as a mass-consumer media category. It’s clear that India is becoming a global content factory.
Advertising and Marketing: Attention Is Fragmented. Capability Is the New Moat.
For marketers and agencies, Budget 2026 reads like a subtle endorsement of what the industry already knows: growth will come from operating smarter.
As digital advertising overtakes traditional formats and OTT and mobile become default screens, the content supply chain has exploded. VFX, dubbing, localisation, post-production, all are now part of a global distribution loop. Campaigns today travel, evolve and take new shapes as they move across screens, languages and communities.
This is where policy meets practice. Support for IT services, simplified safe harbour norms, and automated compliance reduce friction for digital-first firms. But more importantly, investments in skilling, design education, and services-sector growth create the human capital that modern marketing runs on.
Marketing today sits at the intersection of creativity, data, technology and culture. The Budget doesn’t talk about ads directly. It doesn’t need to. It is building the plumbing that modern marketing depends on.
Gen Z: Jobs, Joy and Just Enough Structure
Careers for Gen Z are less linear and more exploratory, shaped by learning, side projects and new opportunities. Millions of young Indians are entering the workforce every year, and aspiration alone is not a strategy. From new university townships, to skilling for tourism, caregiving, design, sports, and AVGC, the emphasis is on employability that matches how young people actually want to work.
The proposed National Institute of Design in eastern India, the focus on services exports, and structured pathways from education to enterprise signal a shift from degrees to direction.
What’s encouraging is the inclusivity lens. Initiatives like Divyangjan Kaushal Yojana recognize that digital and AVGC sectors offer task-oriented roles that can create dignified livelihoods. This is workforce design, not workforce management.
AI: The Productivity Multiplier
If there is one idea that runs through this Budget without being headline-grabbing, it’s Artificial Intelligence.
From panels assessing AI’s impact on jobs, to Bharat Vistaar, a multilingual AI tool for agriculture, to Digital Knowledge Grids creating new ecosystems of research and storytelling, AI is positioned as infrastructure, not novelty.
For M&E and A&M, this matters deeply. AI is already shaping content creation, performance marketing, personalisation, localisation and production economics. For Gen Z, AI is redefining jobs.
Economic Survey Lens: AI, But India-First
The Economic Survey makes an important course correction. It argues that India’s AI strategy must be grounded in its own economic realities. With data centre capacity projected to scale from 1.4 GW to 8 GW by 2030, compute is acknowledged as a bottleneck. At the same time, India’s strength in open-source communities is positioned as a national advantage.
The proposed AI Economic Council, distinct from governance structures, signals maturity. AI here is not just about technology. It’s about aligning deployment with education, skilling, and socio-economic priorities.
For agencies, creators and platforms, this means AI will increasingly become a layer of productivity. Those who integrate it early will compound faster.
The Bottom Line
Budget 2026 is set to build foundations.
For Media and Entertainment, it expands the creator base. For Advertising and Marketing, it strengthens the ecosystem behind attention. For Gen Z, it offers pathways. All this, while making AI unavoidable.
The opportunity now is to re-architect. Because the next phase of India’s growth will be driven by capability at population scale.
- Shrenik Gandhi, Co-founder and CEO, White Rivers Media
