IICT & Netflix offer scholarships to 100 Indian creative talent students

Mumbai: The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) and Netflix have announced scholarships for 100 students, offering financial support of up to 80 per cent across six professional programmes in animation, visual effects, gaming and comics.

The initiative will cover two one-year diploma programmes and four six-month certificate programmes, with scholarships open to students and working professionals across India.

The programmes include diplomas in Interactive Comics & Sequential Arts and Visual Effects Mastery, along with certificates in Virtual Art Department Content Creation, Media Tech Workflow, Art of Character Animation, and E-Sports & Gaming Management.

The scholarship programme follows a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos on August 5. During the meeting, Modi highlighted India’s storytelling tradition and large creative talent pool, while calling for greater development of skills to strengthen the country’s position as a global content creation hub.

The partnership forms part of the Netflix India Storytelling Initiative, which aims to strengthen India’s creative talent pipeline by developing industry-ready skills across the Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics (AVGC) ecosystem.

The curriculum for IICT’s Visual Effects Mastery and Media Tech Workflow programmes has been developed around contemporary industry workflows and global standards, with inputs from Netflix.

Chanchal Kumar, secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and chairman, IICT board, said the creative economy is undergoing a significant transformation as technology changes how stories are created.

He said partnerships with global industry players would help bring practical industry knowledge into classrooms and prepare Indian talent for the changing requirements of the global AVGC-XR industry.

Vishwas Deoskar, CEO, IICT, said the collaboration would bring industry perspectives into the institute’s academic framework, covering areas such as curriculum design, professional workflows and industry standards.

The initiative combines structured education, industry inputs and financial support, with the aim of creating a stronger pipeline of talent for India’s growing creative economy.

Munjal Shroff, chairman, FICCI AVGC-XR Forum, said the FICCI-IICT-Netflix collaboration represents a shift towards industry-aligned talent development for India’s AVGC-XR sector.

IICT is the national centre of excellence for the Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming, Comics and Extended Reality (AVGC-XR) sector. It was established by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in partnership with the Government of Maharashtra, FICCI and CII.

The institute currently operates from the NFDC Complex on Pedder Road in Mumbai, while its permanent 10-acre campus is being developed at Film City, Goregaon.

By combining scholarships with direct industry participation, the programme seeks to make specialised creative training more accessible while aligning India’s talent pipeline with the needs of a rapidly evolving global entertainment industry.