New Delhi: India accounts for 6 percent of global cultural exports and has built one of the world’s most resilient domestic streaming markets, finds a new UNESCO report. It, however, also warns that governments around the world have left the cultural goods sector largely without any protection from artificial intelligence (AI).
The 2026 edition of ‘Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity’, published Thursday under UNESCO’s 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, draws on data from 148 countries over two decades. It places India alongside China—at 19 percent—as the two developing countries that dominate cultural goods trade, even as a wider group of economies, from Turkey to Indonesia, has begun to close the gap.
“While China and India remain dominant, accounting for 19 percent and 6 percent of cultural goods exports respectively in 2023, a broader group of developing countries, including Turkey, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, also contributed to this growth,” it says.
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The AI Gap
The report’s findings on AI are where the policy failure becomes numerical. Of 148 AI-related bills passed across 128 countries between 2016 and 2023, “only one identifies culture as its primary subject matter”. The Conference of the Parties to the 2005 Convention, meeting in 2025, formally concluded that “existing regulatory frameworks are inadequate to address challenges posed by Generative Artificial Intelligence”.
The consequences for creators are already visible in data.
“An overwhelming 79 percent of cultural professionals perceive AI as a threat to their livelihoods, citing the unlicensed use of copyrighted data and the potential devaluation of human creativity,” the report states.
Creators’ income from digital platforms has grown from 17 percent in 2018 to 35 percent in 2023, so the lack of proper AI rules will be more, not less, consequential.
Economic projections in the report put the scale of risk at global revenue losses of 24 percent for music creators—around 4 billion euros per year by 2028—and 21 percent for audio-visual creators, at approximately 4.5 billion euros per year.
“Algorithms now determine how diverse cultural content is distributed, accessed and discovered, with significant implications for public debate,” the report states, describing AI as “a cross-cutting force” that now touches every part of the production chain.
Only 48 percent of countries report any measures to develop data or statistics on access to digital media content, a gap the report attributes in part to “the reluctance of major streaming platforms to share user data, and the limited transparency in AI systems”.
The OTT policy that worked
On streaming, the report documents what India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting set in motion in 2018, when it began encouraging over-the-top (OTT) platforms to produce and promote regional content. The outcome has been the growth of a domestic OTT market that has held its ground against international platforms.
The report cites a 2025 study finding that “although there is growing competition for Hindi and English content streamed on international streaming platforms, regional OTT platforms offering content in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam remain extremely popular in India”.
The study, by Das and Rousseau, concludes that subscription price, linguistic reach and catalogue depth have given local platforms a structural edge over global competitors.
The ministry’s push, the report notes, contributed to “a greater availability of diverse cultural influences and content in regional dialects as well as providing a platform for regional creators to reach a wider audience”.
The report presents this model as a reference point for other developing countries trying to protect domestic content from platform consolidation.
Trade agreements without cultural clauses
India features in the report’s audit of trade agreements for their treatment of cultural diversity. Three agreements involving India—Comprehensive Economic Cooperation and Partnership Agreement with Mauritius (2021), Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with the UAE (2022), and the Australia-India Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (2022)—are reviewed in a table tracking whether deals include cultural exception clauses, digital inclusion provisions or references to the 2005 Convention.
None of the three agreements includes provisions on culture.
The report also notes that under the Mauritius-India agreement, “Mauritius and India exchanged market access in cultural services”. It classifies this bilateral arrangement as South-South cooperation rather than the preferential treatment the Convention was designed to guarantee for developing countries. The distinction matters for how aid and market access are counted under international frameworks.
India also signed a cultural exchange programme with Tanzania covering 2023 to 2027, cited by the report as an instance of South-South cooperation “to deepen cultural relations” and “support the development of cultural and creative industries in alignment with broader development goals”.
One finding cuts across both the India story and the AI story: the movement of artists.
According to it, 96 percent of developed countries support outward mobility for their own cultural professionals. Only 38 percent facilitate inward mobility from developing nations.
The report describes this as “a persistent ‘visa wall’ that restricts the movement of artists from the Global South”.
The numbers underneath
Global trade in cultural goods has doubled since 2005 to reach $254.28 billion in 2023.
Developing countries have expanded their share of cultural goods exports at 8.5 percent year-on-year, against 1.8 percent for developed countries. Developing countries’ share of global trade in cultural services has risen from 12 percent in 2010 to 20 percent in 2023.
Yet, development aid for culture stands at 0.15 percent of total Country Programmable Aid. India received $4.4 million in culture-related aid in 2022—ninth on the list of recipients, behind Egypt at $30.5 million and Albania at $23.6 million.
The UNESCO International Fund for Cultural Diversity, which funds structural policy work in developing countries, operates on annual contributions of around $1 million. India made a contribution in 2024.
“Protecting and promoting the diversity of cultural expressions requires influence over digital and Artificial Intelligence (AI),” the report says, concluding that such influence does not yet exist in law.
(Edited by Vidhi Bhutra)
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