India details annual Union Budget 2026–here’s what industry leaders think of it

India — The government of India has rolled out its annual Union Budget for 2026, with allocations for digital infrastructure, social welfare, and other sectors heavily highlighted. With these factors as key priorities, marketing and advertising face potential adaptation needs, prompting marketers to overhaul strategies, reallocate advertising budgets, and reinvent consumer engagement approaches to stay aligned with India’s evolving development.

Given this, MARKETECH APAC spoke with industry leaders to unpack how the 2026 budget impacts the current marketing and advertising environment and how to maximise growth opportunities across India’s evolving creative economy.

Chetan Asher, founder and CEO, Tonic Worldwide

Orange Economy gets its moment in this budget. Probably for the first time, creative industries gets (get) a seat at the budget table. AVGC labs across 15,500 schools and colleges, a new National Institute of Design, (and) explicit recognition of creative services as a growth engine. For an industry that’s often invisible in policy conversations, this is a welcome shift.

More importantly, it signals a broader pivot. India’s services advantage is evolving from IT and back-office operations to design, content, and creative technology.

From being a back-end, we can own the front end. The government is betting that our next competitive edge will be imagination, not just efficiency.

For brands and agencies, this opens a genuine runway. The talent pipeline is expanding. The infrastructure is being prioritized. The question now is how we channel this into building Indian brands that resonate globally. Not just more services exports, but Indian creativity that the world values and pays a premium for. It’s building Indian IP and Indian brands the world actually wants. This needs equal impetus.

Rohit Srinivasan, head of marketing, Loca Loka 

This Budget is less about spend (spending) and more about future-proofing creative muscle, and that’s a big win for marketing and advertising in India.

India has never lacked creative minds; what it lacked was a future-ready learning environment at scale. The creation of 15,000 content creator hubs, alongside AVGC and design-led investments, directly addresses that gap by building talent that is culturally fluent, tech-native, and industry-ready from day one. This is a clear acknowledgement of one of the industry’s long-standing challenges.

These aren’t policy headlines; they are credible feeder systems for strategists, designers, storytellers, gamers, and technologists who think natively in video, immersive formats, and IP-led creativity. That’s gold for brands trying to keep pace with culture and with talent that can scale alongside them. What’s particularly smart is the shift from pure execution to original IP creation, spanning gaming, indigenous design, and semiconductor-led product thinking. This moves Indian talent from service providers to idea owners, raising the overall quality of brand thinking.

For agencies and marketing teams, the implication is clear. The next wave of creative leaders will arrive industry-ready, reducing learning curves and injecting speed into the ecosystem. But this shift cuts both ways. As talent sharpens, brands will be under pressure to stay relevant, purposeful, and creatively ambitious to attract the best minds.

India will no longer just supply creative talent. It now has the potential to set the terms of engagement.

Ravanan N, CEO, Oneindia

The Finance Minister’s announcement of a full review of the Foreign Exchange Management (Non-Debt Instruments) Rules, 2019, in the Union Budget this year, is an important step toward modernizing India’s foreign investment framework. A more agile and predictable approach to foreign capital can help remove funding bottlenecks, enable Indian companies to raise equity faster, and strengthen long-term engagement with global investors. 

For digital media platforms operating at the intersection of content, commerce, and data, access to capital is critical for building cloud infrastructure, AI-led systems, and scalable technology capabilities. If this review leads to simpler investment pathways while maintaining strong domestic governance, it can meaningfully support sustainable growth across India’s emerging digital ecosystems.