The Hindu Business Line : Mission to make Pune global animation, gaming hub

Pune May 10 The Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (MCCIA) is spearheading a mission to make Pune a global hub in the worldwide animation and gaming industry that currently stands at $80 billion and is poised to touch $123 billion by 2010.

The chamber has established a sub-committee under the stewardship of Commodore Anand Khandekar for the purpose, and will push for a separate State Government policy to help develop the industry among other initiatives.

Experts roped in

Experts from various specialities, including academician Dr A.S. Kolaskar and Pune ex-mayor Vandana Chavan have been roped in to help give a thrust to the project, while filmmakers Amol and Sandhya Palekar are brand ambassadors.

Asserting that animation and gaming stands today at exactly the same position that the IT business was in 1996, accounting for less than 2 per cent of the current $80-billion global business, Commodore Subodh Purohit, Additional Director-General of MCCIA, said this was the second time that the chamber was pushing a new field.

"We want to bring non-IT people on the IT bandwagon in terms of prosperity,'' said Commodore Khandekar, who incidentally also pushed the Chamber's IT mission a decade ago. Dr Kolaskar pointed out that not only will entertainment industry benefit from the initiative, so would education and the health industry.

"The price of a single teaching aid at Stanford was recently quoted at $20 billion,'' he said, while Sandhya Palekar gave an insight into the prohibitive cost of animation in their film Paheli.

"A small three-minute sequence of a bird flying cost Rs 70,000 per second,'' she said.

To push for development of the industry, the MCCIA proposes to establish educational institutes for animation and gaming, and introducing courses of short duration, bringing together trainers, local studios and buyers on a common platform and forging commercial links with overseas markets such as China, Japan, Korea, the US and the UK among other initiatives.

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Mission to make Pune global animation, gaming hub

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