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Informist, Friday, Aug. 21, 2026

NEW DELHI – India needs to reform the intellectual property laws to protect designs and techniques of domestic artists as well as support its culture-creative economy amid incidents such as the Prada-Kolhapuri case, according to the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations. In 2025, around 57 million workers were employed in India's culture-creative economy, constituting nearly 9% of India's total workforce, the public policy organisation said in a working paper. In 2017-18 (Apr-Mar), around 40.6 million people were engaged in cultural and creative activities.

This shows that India's creative economy is among the most culturally significant, yet it is among the least measured sectors, the organisation said in "Estimating employment in India's cultural and creative economy: Evidence from the periodic labour force survey" paper. "Weak enforcement of IP (intellectual property) laws, outdated legal frameworks and limited awareness of IP rights, particularly among rural and small-scale creators, diminish the commercial value of original works and deprive artists of fair compensation."

At last year's Milan Fashion Week, Prada showcased leather sandals similar to "Kolhapuri chappals", for which the brand acknowledged the design inspiration. This led to criticism in India over cultural appropriation and insufficient credit to local artisans. The locally made footwear has been granted geographical indication status in India in 2019, protecting only the name and heritage. "This exposed gaps in India's IP and GI (geographical indication) frameworks in protecting cultural expressions, traditional designs and artisanal knowledge from unauthorised commercial use," the paper said. The paper aims to make India's cultural economy sufficiently visible in national accounts and policy frameworks to be protected, equitably developed and positioned as a genuine driver of inclusive growth.

The paper also highlighted challenges in the sector, such as skill gap, infrastructure deficiencies, market access, commercialisation constraints, limited financial access, and technology-driven challenges. Concentration of employment growth in low-value manufacturing, knowledge-intensive segments accounting for a disproportionately small share of the workforce, and stagnated real wages for women are few other obstacles faced by the people associated with the sector.

These reflect the absence of a coherent institutional and statistical framework within which the cultural economy can be measured, governed, and systematically invested in. "Addressing the issues requires a coherent national strategy starting by creating a dedicated Cultural Satellite Account and formal industrial recognition for the sector," the paper said.

To ensure a movement from low-value to high-value, scalable activities, India also needs to invest in training infrastructure, as well as targeted capacity building initiatives. "There is also a need for a gender-specific agenda on wages, mobility and credit; IP reform extending protection to design and technique; and measures to cushion creative workers against AI-driven disruption," it said.  End

Reported by Shweta

Edited by Deepshikha Bhardwaj

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