THE DESI TOY BOOM

A POLICY PUSH HELPS INDIA'S TOY SECTOR PICK UP, BUT LACK OF PRECISION ENGINEERING AND HIGH CAPITAL INVESTMENT HAMPER ITS FULL POTENTIAL

- SONAL KHETARPAL

TOYS ARE CRUCIAL FOR Kiran Bala, 38, an assistant professor at the Delhi School of Economics, to keep her three children-an eight-year-old daughter and 18-month-old twins-occupied. "As an academic who has to juggle parenting with teaching and self-study, I need toys to keep my kids engaged for long," she says.

Kiran is among the millions of parents driving the growth of India's toy market. The sector, valued at about $1.5 billion (Rs 12,300 crore) in 2022, is projected to double to $3 billion by 2028, at a compound annual growth rate of over 12 per cent. The opportunity could be larger, given that the organised market is just 10 per cent of the overall market, which is populated by unorganised small businesses. It was this turnaround story-how India has transformed from a net importer to a global exporter, and Indian-made toys are now found in markets across the world-that found a proud mention in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Independence Day speech this year.

POLICY PUSH

The government has hard-focused on the toy sector to reposition India as a global manufacturing and sourcing hub rather than just a market. This has seen an outright inversion of the export-import equation between FY19 and FY24: raising toy exports by 40 per cent-from $109 million (Rs 896 crore) to $152 million (Rs 1,250 crore)-and whittling imports down by 79 per centfrom $304 million (Rs 2,500 crore) to $65 million (Rs 535 crore)—as per a May report by economic think-tank Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI).