Arun Jaitley hails global popularity of Indian cinema

Lauding the reach of Indian cinema across the globe, Minister of Information and Broadcasting Arun Jaitley called the Indian film industry “its soft power abroad” and announced the government’s intention to set up a film and television Institute in the north eastern region, “for the benefit of the young creative minds”.

Speaking at the 62nd National Film Awards ceremony held at Vigyan Bhawan on Sunday, Jaitley said, “We lead the world average in terms of number of movies produced each year. Indian movies have found increasing acceptance in the international forum.”

“[The] government is committed to take all possible measures towards the overall growth of the film industry — towards its even spread across the country and not restricted to certain pockets,” He said the number one priority of the government is to take the entertainment industry to every nook and corner of India, which includes setting up of a film and television institute in the northeast.

Jaitley appreciated award-winning films such as Mary Kom and Queen for bringing women into the spotlight. “We witness the triumph of the spirit of liberation and empowerment of women-centric themes on the silver screen. The success of movies such as Queen and Mary Kom are testimony to this.

Social values have influenced our cinema and similarly our cinema has also had a great impact on our social values,” he said.

The minister, dressed in a light-coloured Kurta Pajama with a Nehru jacket, said: “Spread over the fruitful 100 years of Indian cinema, the saga has been that of a spirit of entrepreneurship,” he said, adding that experimentation and innovation with new themes in form, content and technology have always been employed by filmmakers in India.

He also congratulated young singer Uttara Unnikrishanan, who won the Best Playback Female Singer award for the song Azhagu from Tamil movie Saivam. “I would like to congratulate her on her achievement at an early age.

We wait for the time when she will captivate the world with her melodious voice,” Jaitley said.

What Modi can offer to China

Five sectors where India has potential to significantly increase exports and pack a punch in trade.

In less than one year, the heads of state of the world's two most populous countries have reciprocated visits. President Xi Jinping visited Ahmedabad and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Xian, the hometown of Xi. That speaks of their personal touch to these official visits. The bilateral economic relationship between India and China is one of the most dynamic and significant ones in the world.

Our bilateral trade has grown exponentially, soon to touch $100 billion, even though we don't speak the same language. The trade is unfortunately getting increasingly skewed in favour of China. India's deficit with China will be $40 billion and that's not good. How then to increase our exports to China? This is one of the major items on Modi's agenda. Here are five sectors where we need an aggressive push. The first is pharmaceuticals. India produces generic and bulk drugs at probably the lowest cost in the world. We also produce some molecules and non-generic drugs. In AIDS and cancer drugs, our costs are 70 per cent to 90 per cent cheaper than those in the West. Hence India's pharma exports can easily help China reduce its overall healthcare costs. But there are barriers. The Chinese drug regulator, FDA, is supposedly even more strict than the US FDA, causing huge delays in getting approvals for our drugs.

The second area is IT and software. Here too we are the world's leader in offshore and outsourcing. But we are unable to penetrate the huge Chinese IT services market. The blame lies partly with our own software industry, which has largely ignored the non-English speaking world market, such as Japan, Korea or even Germany. (There may be exceptions.) On their part, too, the Chinese need to be open about letting in Indian IT service providers.

The third sector where India can make a dent is cinema and entertainment. China has severe restrictions on importing cinema. Thankfully, there are some signs of opening up. Aamir Khan is India's most popular actor in China, and his 3 Idiots was a super hit. So, this week, ahead of Modi's visit, he will be in China, at the release of PK (dubbed) across 3,000 theatres. This trickle needs to be converted to a flood. Look how Hollywood rules the world entertainment industry. Can Indian cinema not get a small chunk of the Chinese pie?

The fourth sector is tourism. Chinese are the world's largest group of tourists, with more than 100 million outbound tourists every year. Guess how many of them came to India? Less than 100,000, which is less than 0.1 per cent. Surely, we can double or triple that easily? For that we need to make the visa procedure easier. It is likely that Modi will announce e-visa facility for Chinese tourists. We also need to market Indian tourism aggressively in China. How about if Aamir Khan or Eros International made a Chinese movie, set in Sikkim or Kerala? That would promote both tourism and cinema!

A fifth area for increasing India's exports is industrial goods, including auto ancillaries, small-scale engineering, metal works, etc. In the past couple of years, wages in China have gone up by more than 50 per cent and India's currency has gone down by 20 per cent against Chinese currency. Resultantly, India's manufacturing sector (at least some parts) have a 70 to 80 per cent advantage, which cannot be negated even with higher Chinese productivity and efficiency.

Apart from these five examples, Modi can make a grand offer to China. Since we owe $40 billion to them (our net trade deficit), ask them to invest that money annually into India's infrastructure (like roads, ports, airports, dams, power projects). We can guarantee them a better return than what they get from investing in the US bonds. They anyway have a stock of close to $4 trillion foreign exchange, so 40 bn is barely 1 per cent.

China-India economic embrace is imperative and inevitable. Hence the Modi-Xi engagement is historic.