Despite its scale and cultural significance, India’s cultural and creative economy has not been systematically measured. This paper presents an empirical estimate of its contribution to employment, adapting the international classification frameworks used by UNESCO and the European Union (EU) to the Indian context through a mapping of cultural domains and value chain stages to the National Industrial Classification (NIC-2008). Applying this framework to unit-level data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2017-18 and 2025, the paper estimates that approximately 57 million workers, amounting to nearly 9 per cent of India’s total workforce, are engaged in cultural and creative activities. Moreover, there has been a 40 per cent increase in the culture-creative workforce over seven years and female employment has doubled. Yet, at present, there is concentration of employment in low-value manufacturing and real wages for women have stagnated. There are other institutional and policy challenges that need to be addressed. Addressing these requires a coherent national strategy spanning institutional reform, gender-targeted interventions and strengthened geographical indication protections. These findings are offered as a methodological primer towards building a more robust, recurring measurement of India’s cultural economy, including value-added estimation through a dedicated Cultural Satellite Account.
