New Delhi: India accounts for six p.c of world cultural exports and has constructed one of many world’s most resilient home streaming markets, finds a brand new UNESCO report. It, nonetheless, additionally warns that governments all over the world have left the cultural items sector largely with none safety from synthetic intelligence (AI).
The 2026 version of ‘Re|Shaping Insurance policies for Creativity’, revealed Thursday underneath UNESCO’s 2005 Conference on the Safety and Promotion of the Variety of Cultural Expressions, attracts on information from 148 international locations over twenty years. It locations India alongside China—at 19 p.c—as the 2 growing international locations that dominate cultural items commerce, at the same time as a wider group of economies, from Turkey to Indonesia, has begun to shut the hole.
“Whereas China and India stay dominant, accounting for 19 p.c and 6 p.c of cultural items exports respectively in 2023, a broader group of growing international locations, together with Turkey, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, additionally contributed to this progress,” it says.
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The AI Hole
The report’s findings on AI are the place the coverage failure turns into numerical. Of 148 AI-related payments handed throughout 128 international locations between 2016 and 2023, “just one identifies tradition as its main subject material”. The Convention of the Events to the 2005 Conference, assembly in 2025, formally concluded that “current regulatory frameworks are insufficient to handle challenges posed by Generative Synthetic Intelligence”.
The results for creators are already seen in information.
“An awesome 79 p.c of cultural professionals understand AI as a risk to their livelihoods, citing the unlicensed use of copyrighted information and the potential devaluation of human creativity,” the report states.
Creators’ revenue from digital platforms has grown from 17 p.c in 2018 to 35 p.c in 2023, so the dearth of correct AI guidelines might be extra, not much less, consequential.
Financial projections within the report put the size of threat at international income losses of 24 p.c for music creators—round 4 billion euros per 12 months by 2028—and 21 p.c for audio-visual creators, at roughly 4.5 billion euros per 12 months.
“Algorithms now decide how numerous cultural content material is distributed, accessed and found, with important implications for public debate,” the report states, describing AI as “a cross-cutting pressure” that now touches each a part of the manufacturing chain.
Solely 48 p.c of nations report any measures to develop information or statistics on entry to digital media content material, a spot the report attributes partially to “the reluctance of main streaming platforms to share person information, and the restricted transparency in AI methods”.
The OTT coverage that labored
On streaming, the report paperwork what India’s Ministry of Info and Broadcasting set in movement in 2018, when it started encouraging over-the-top (OTT) platforms to provide and promote regional content material. The end result has been the expansion of a home OTT market that has held its floor in opposition to worldwide platforms.
The report cites a 2025 examine discovering that “though there may be rising competitors for Hindi and English content material streamed on worldwide streaming platforms, regional OTT platforms providing content material in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam stay extraordinarily in style in India”.
The examine, by Das and Rousseau, concludes that subscription worth, linguistic attain and catalogue depth have given native platforms a structural edge over international opponents.
The ministry’s push, the report notes, contributed to “a better availability of numerous cultural influences and content material in regional dialects in addition to offering a platform for regional creators to achieve a wider viewers”.
The report presents this mannequin as a reference level for different growing international locations making an attempt to guard home content material from platform consolidation.
Commerce agreements with out cultural clauses
India options within the report’s audit of commerce agreements for his or her therapy of cultural variety. Three agreements involving India—Complete Financial Cooperation and Partnership Settlement with Mauritius (2021), Complete Financial Partnership Settlement with the UAE (2022), and the Australia-India Financial Cooperation and Commerce Settlement (2022)—are reviewed in a desk monitoring whether or not offers embrace cultural exception clauses, digital inclusion provisions or references to the 2005 Conference.
Not one of the three agreements contains provisions on tradition.
The report additionally notes that underneath the Mauritius-India settlement, “Mauritius and India exchanged market entry in cultural providers”. It classifies this bilateral association as South-South cooperation fairly than the preferential therapy the Conference was designed to ensure for growing international locations. The excellence issues for the way support and market entry are counted underneath worldwide frameworks.
India additionally signed a cultural alternate programme with Tanzania protecting 2023 to 2027, cited by the report for instance of South-South cooperation “to deepen cultural relations” and “assist the event of cultural and artistic industries in alignment with broader improvement objectives”.
One discovering cuts throughout each the India story and the AI story: the motion of artists.
In accordance with it, 96 p.c of developed international locations assist outward mobility for their very own cultural professionals. Solely 38 p.c facilitate inward mobility from growing nations.
The report describes this as “a persistent ‘visa wall’ that restricts the motion of artists from the International South”.
The numbers beneath
International commerce in cultural items has doubled since 2005 to achieve $254.28 billion in 2023.
Growing international locations have expanded their share of cultural items exports at 8.5 p.c year-on-year, in opposition to 1.8 p.c for developed international locations. Growing international locations’ share of world commerce in cultural providers has risen from 12 p.c in 2010 to twenty p.c in 2023.
But, improvement support for tradition stands at 0.15 p.c of whole Nation Programmable Assist. India obtained $4.4 million in culture-related support in 2022—ninth on the checklist of recipients, behind Egypt at $30.5 million and Albania at $23.6 million.
The UNESCO Worldwide Fund for Cultural Variety, which funds structural coverage work in growing international locations, operates on annual contributions of round $1 million. India made a contribution in 2024.
“Defending and selling the variety of cultural expressions requires affect over digital and Synthetic Intelligence (AI),” the report says, concluding that such affect doesn’t but exist in legislation.
(Edited by Vidhi Bhutra)
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