Playing field: India's toy story needs govt strongly backing the game

80% toys still imported, mostly from China; local industry suffers from lack of scale and innovation

At the mega toy fair in February this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of two ancient Indian board games, chess and ludo, to emphasise the rich legacy of the country’s toy industry. And now again he’s made a case for innovation in this industry to boost exports and improve India’s position in “Toyconomy”, as he called it, saying our share in the $100-billion global toy market is currently a mere 1.5 per cent.

Market research agency IMARC echoes Modi when it says that in India, toys date back 5000 years to the Indus Valley Civilisation. The earliest ones included