CII White Paper Charts $100 Billion Media Entertainment Goal

The two day CII Big Picture Summit 2026 opened in Mumbai on 15 October 2026 under the theme The New Economics of Media and Entertainment: Building India's Future Global Media Companies. Its most quotable outcome was a white paper from the Confederation of Indian Industry that maps a route for the Indian media and entertainment sector to reach $100 billion by the early 2030s.

What the white paper asks for

Titled The New Economics of Media and Entertainment, the paper argues for reform at greater speed, for regional markets to be built up, and for implementation that can actually be measured rather than merely announced. Those three levers, in its reading, are what would carry the sector to the headline figure.

The government's message

Addressing the inaugural session, the Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Shri Chanchal Kumar, asked the industry to look past sheer size and work instead on original intellectual property, business models that can last, and entry into markets abroad. The aim, he said, is to make India a leading wellspring of creative content, technology, talent and media companies able to compete worldwide. He connected the summit's theme to the Prime Minister's WAVES 2025 vision of Create In India, Create For The World, and listed state backed building blocks already in place: WAVES, WAVES Bazaar, the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) and India Cine Hub. A firm anti piracy framework, he added, is needed to defend creative work, and he summed up the ambition as creating in India, owning in India, scaling from India and taking it to the world.

Voices from the industry

• Gaurav Banerjee, Summit Chair and MD and CEO of Sony Pictures Networks India, said a large audience is only a starting point and not a business model in itself, urging attention to audience value, measurable advertiser outcomes and durable investor returns.
• Gunjan Soni, Summit Co Chair and Country MD of YouTube India, called creativity and culture economic strengths that feed the Viksit Bharat goal, with digital tools and artificial intelligence helping young creators turn local identity into world class enterprises.
• Rajan Navani, Summit Co Chair and MD and CEO of JetSynthesys, said widely available technology and artificial intelligence are closing the gap between imagination and execution.

Investor meet

Shri Chanchal Kumar also opened the WAVES Global Investor and Investee Meet, which brought together more than 150 investors and investees and linked in close to 20 participants drawn from WaveX and WAVES Bazaar.