I&B Ministry
I&B’s 2025 report card: Lights, camera, action — and Rs 4,334 crore
NEW DELHI: If 2025 was India’s year to make waves, the ministry of information and broadcasting (I&B) was its chief surfboard maker. Prime minister Narendra Modi’s call to “create in India, create for the world” wasn’t just ministerial hot air—it triggered a tsunami of creative dealmaking that swept from Melbourne to Madrid, generating Rs 4,334 crores in potential business discussions and putting Indian creators on every continent’s radar.
The centrepiece was Waves 2025, the World Audio Visual and Entertainment Summit, which drew over 90 countries, 10,000 delegates, and roughly 1 lakh punters through its doors. Modi himself dropped by to glad-hand young creators, describing the event as a “wave of culture, creativity and universal connectivity”—and for once, the hyperbole wasn’t entirely unwarranted.
The summit’s CreatoSphere platform, which sounds like something from a sci-fi novel but is actually a hub for film, VFX, animation, gaming, and digital media, launched the Create in India Challenges. Season one attracted over 1 lakh entries from more than 60 countries across 33 categories. Winners weren’t just handed certificates and sent packing—they performed at Melbourne, exhibited at Tokyo Game Show, and pitched at Toronto International Film Festival. I&B minister Ashwini Vaishnav handed out gongs to 150 creators, cementing the government’s commitment to nurturing what it calls the “creative economy.”
WaveX, the startup arm, proved equally industrious. It coaxed over 200 startups into its embrace, enabled 30 to pitch to Microsoft, Amazon, and Lumikai, and somehow got two of its charges—VYGR News and VIVA Technologies—onto Shark Tank India, where they presumably dodged the usual mauling. The initiative’s KalaaSetu and BhashaSetu challenges, focused on AI-driven video generation and real-time translation respectively, attracted over 100 startups and picked ten for collaboration with government media units.
Waves Bazaar, the “craft-to-commerce” global e-marketplace, went on a roadshow between August and December, hitting 12 international events across four continents and four domestic jamborees. The numbers are eye-watering: over 9,000 B2B meetings, 10 memoranda of understanding signed, three more proposed, and the launch of creative corridors with Japan, Korea, and Australia. The ministry claims Rs 4,334 crores in potential deals—potential being the operative word, though in India’s booming content market, optimism often precedes reality by only a few quarters.
On the bricks-and-mortar front, the Indian Institute of Creative Technology opened its temporary Mumbai campus in July with Rs 391.15 crores in budgetary support. The public-private partnership with Ficci and CII has enrolled over 100 students across 18 courses, incubated eight startups, and signed memoranda with Google, Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and WPP—a who’s who of tech giants keen to tap India’s creative reserves. A permanent 10 acre campus at Film City, Goregaon, complete with an immersive AR/VR/XR studio, is in the works.
Elsewhere, the ministry set up a Live Events Development Cell to position India’s concert economy as a growth driver. A single-window clearance system is being built on the India Cine Hub platform to expedite permissions for fire, traffic, and municipal approvals—addressing the red-tape nightmares that have long plagued event organisers. Meanwhile, an inter-ministerial committee is tackling digital piracy, that perennial thorn in the creative economy’s side.
State broadcaster Doordarshan snagged the Election Commission’s media award for voter awareness during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, presented by the president on National Voters’ Day. Community radio added 22 new stations, bringing the total to 551, with workshops and a national sammelan held during Waves to strengthen local broadcasting.
The 56th International Film Festival of India in Goa screened over 240 films from 81 countries, threw in the country’s first AI Film Festival, and staged a grand parade through Panaji that turned the event into a street-level celebration. The accompanying Waves Film Bazaar drew over 2,500 delegates from 40-plus countries and showcased 320 projects—making it one of South Asia’s largest film markets.
The Central Board of Film Certification modernised too, launching a multilingual certification module that allows multiple language versions under a single application, and mandating 50 per cent women’s participation on examining and revising committees. Digital signatures replaced wet ink, and certificates became downloadable—small victories in the fight against bureaucratic inertia.
India’s I&B ministry ended 2025 having turned content creation into something resembling an industrial policy. Whether Rs 4,334 crores in “potential” business materialises remains to be seen, but the ministry has built the infrastructure, corralled the startups, and put Indian creators on international stages. As Modi might say, the wave has been ridden. Now comes the hard part: keeping the momentum going when the cameras stop rolling.
I&B Ministry
PIB Fact Check Unit flags 2,913 fake claims, blocks 1,400 URLs
Government steps up misinformation fight with FCU and IT Rules framework.
MUMBAI: In the age of viral forwards and deepfake déjà vu, the government’s fact-checkers are working overtime to separate fact from fiction. India’s Press Information Bureau Fact Check Unit (FCU), operating under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, has flagged a total of 2,913 instances of fake news and misinformation linked to the Central Government, highlighting the growing scale of the information battle in the digital era.
Tasked with identifying misleading content from AI-generated videos and deepfakes to forged notifications, letters and spoofed websites, the FCU verifies claims using authorised sources before publishing corrections across its social media channels. These include platforms such as X, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Threads and WhatsApp, turning the government’s digital presence into a real-time myth-busting network.
But the effort is not just top-down. The FCU has also been nudging citizens to play detective, encouraging users to report suspicious content for verification. The idea is simple: in a landscape where misinformation travels faster than facts, crowd-sourced vigilance can act as an early warning system.
The scale of intervention became particularly visible during Operation Sindoor, when the unit identified and countered a surge of misleading and hostile narratives circulating online. Alongside publishing verified information, the Ministry directed the blocking of more than 1,400 URLs on digital platforms, an aggressive move aimed at containing the spread of false and potentially harmful content.
The broader regulatory backbone for this effort lies in the Information Technology Rules 2021, which set out a Code of Ethics for digital publishers and establish a three-tier grievance redressal mechanism. The framework is designed to hold publishers of news and online curated content accountable, even as the ecosystem grows increasingly complex.
The update was shared in the Lok Sabha by L. Murugan, minister of state for information and broadcasting, in response to a question raised by V. K. Sreekandan.
Together, the numbers tell a clear story: misinformation is no longer a fringe problem but a mainstream challenge. And as the lines between real and manipulated content continue to blur, the battle for credibility is being fought not just in newsrooms but across every screen in the country.
