The Hindu Business Line : Bollywood calls for the means to a fund

AGREED, you don't have the looks of Hrithik or the charm of Ash, and so find it tough to gain a foothold in Bollywood. The next best thing could be to become an investor. The `fantastic new opportunity', as Media Moguls reports in www.nachnach.com, "the UK's number one Asian magazine", is from the Bollywood Media and Entertainment Fund. It is offering potential investors "the chance to place their money in the Indian film industry as it continues to expand." The doors to Bollywood are now open to experienced investors for `the opportunity to invest in film production in India'.

What will the Fund do? It proposes to work with major production houses and aims at generating "capital growth through investment into films and their intellectual property through the provision of finance". To help the Fund in selecting the right films to invest in, there would be "an expert Film Advisory Board" including Pritish Nandy. His firm Pritish Nandy Communications is cited as "the year's most creative and successful film production house".

The USPs of the Indian media and entertainment industry, apart from being "one of the biggest and fastest growing business sectors in the world", are: lavish production sets, masala music, dance sequences and the iconic status of stars. From the current $335 million, Bollywood estimates its exports to touch $3.3 billion by 2005, notes the report.

Thus, when on April 1, 2004, Accountancy magazine reported, "E&Y promotes investment in Bollywood," there was no attempt to fool readers about the Big Four firm Ernst and Young. It was only in mid-March that the firm, along with FICCI, had spoken eloquently about the entertainment industry: "2003 was a good year for the Indian film industry. There were 16 Bollywood films that had grossed more than Rs 10 crore from domestic exploitation compared to 13 films in the previous year." The FICCI-E&Y report, concluded thus: "What lies ahead for the entertainment industry in India is a period of opportunity - the industry has the mettle to grow and the ability of the industry to exploit the opportunities created by these changes will be critical to its success." Interestingly, another report in Accountancy, dated March 26, talks about the UK Government clamp-down on tax avoidance schemes. What may, therefore, worry regulators is that the Fund is domiciled on the Isle of Man, a tax haven.