New Delhi, 01-02-2021 By Anjan Mitra, Consulting Editor, IBW

The media and entertainment (M&E) sector may not pop the champagne bottle after having heard some time back India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman deliver the budget speech for financial year 2021-22. Unless some good news is hidden in the fine prints.

Prima facie no policy initiatives were announced that could directly impact the M&E sector, which too, like any other business, has been reeling under severe financial constraints owing to the pandemic that has severely slowed down revenue generation.

India’s M&E sector is expected to clock around USD 55 billion by 2024, according to a report, and traditionally has been a big source of employment generation — a capacity that got hit as pandemic spread in India February-March 2020 onwards resulting in several months of lockdown.

Though the M&E sector did not have much expectations, especially as the FM had more important sectors like housing and rural development to look into, it was being hoped against hope that at least the cable sector would be granted an infrastructure sector status and movie theatre-related activities would be handed some sops.

The only good point is that no major additional tax was announced for the corporate sector.

Initial reactions from some of the industry leaders we spoke to highlighted that they are still scanning the fine prints to see if there’s sop. We’d update you all as more details come through.