Screenshot from Kuku TV

India's micro drama sector is undergoing explosive growth, largely fueled by the successful business and content models pioneered by China's booming mobile-based short drama industry, foreign media has reported. 

While the market possesses solid user and industrial foundations that enable it to replicate China's early-stage expansion, industry experts have pointed out structural barriers that may cap its long-term development, including insufficient content, technological support and mismatched user habits.

The Financial Times reported that India's micro-drama revenue reached about $300 million in 2025 and is projected to reach as much as $4.5 billion by 2030, citing interactive media venture capital firm Lumikai. 

When it comes to differences, China's market is far larger. According to figures released by China's National Radio and Television Administration, the micro-drama market surpassed 100 billion yuan ($14.9 billion) in 2025, doubling its size from 2024, according to a Beijing Youth Daily report.

Feng Anrong, a senior industry insider who runs an AI production studio, attributed the explosive growth to the incremental dividend of the mobile internet era, consistent with China's early boom. 

"Global entertainment consumption is shifting from big screens to small mobile screens, and fragmented entertainment demand is a global trend," Feng told the Global Times on Thursday. 

"India's micro-drama sector lags behind China's by several years and is still in the early market-cultivation stage, far from reaching its growth ceiling. With 5G and smartphone penetration, rapid expansion is natural," Feng said.

US media outlet CNBC noted that India's micro-drama industry started by dubbing Chinese micro-dramas into local languages before evolving into localized plot adaptations. 

Zhang Peng, a cultural researcher and associate professor at Nanjing Normal University, told the Global Times that India's absorption of Chinese micro-drama experience has been hierarchical. 

"India has fully copied China's core content formats, including vertical-screen shooting, two-minute single episodes, high-frequency plot twists and suspenseful endings, which have been widely adopted by local platforms such as Kuku TV," said Zhang.

He stressed that India has completely replicated China's mature short-video storytelling framework, but it cannot mechanically copy the entire profiting model.

In terms of commercial operations, while traffic acquisition and subscription mechanisms have been partially adopted, China's model of paying for individual episodes has proven to be nonviable in India due to local users' sensitivity to high prices, making ad-supported free streaming the mainstream profit method.

Zhang emphasized that India shares the same foundational growth drivers as China, including "hundreds of millions of smartphone users and widespread fragmented viewing habits." 

"Most Indian viewers are new to micro-dramas, their viewing habits are still being cultivated, and the market is still in the early incremental stage," Zhang noted. 

Zhang said the track is a long-term growth sector rather than a fleeting fad, with viewing behavior shifting from occasional browsing to regular consumption and a localized industrial chain integrating IP creation, production and distribution taking initial shape. 

"For sustainable growth, India needs to optimize its business model with a hybrid monetization of ads and mini-subscriptions, deepen localized content creation instead of creating simple remakes, and establish standardized content review and grading systems," said Zhang.

For industry insider Feng, a striking structural difference between the two countries' markets lies in user demographics. "Despite India's 800 million smartphone users, its 50 million micro-drama viewers are mainly middle- and high-income groups, while China's micro-drama audience is dominated by grassroots 'sinking-market' users. The untapped mass market means huge growth potential but also unstable user foundations," Feng added.

Feng noted that blind duplication of China's model has led to obvious localization problems. Initially, Indian platforms directly imported and translated Chinese micro-dramas, but the story logic and cultural values rooted in Chinese social context failed to fit India's unique religious traditions and ideological norms. 

"Chinese drama's core emotional appeal and settings are deeply rooted in its domestic social context, which do not resonate well with Indian audiences with distinct religious and cultural backgrounds," Feng explained, adding that early attempts to repurpose Bollywood classic footage into short dramas also flopped, prompting many Bollywood practitioners to join the sector and drive localized creation.

Yet Feng pointed out that the growth ceiling is constrained by two core weaknesses. First, content foundations are weak. China's micro-drama boom relies on decades' development of online literature, with massive mature IPs and a huge creator base supporting mass production. India lacks a well-developed online literature industry, and reserves of quality scripts are insufficient. "You can have many actors and technicians, but content requires years of accumulation," Feng said. 

Second, new technology iteration is lagging. China's micro-drama industry has entered a stage of integrating live-action and AI-generated dramas, with AI significantly reducing costs and boosting capacity. India, however, lags in AI video models and smart production technologies, and the cost-reduction advantages of AI have not yet been fully utilized. Bollywood's traditional big-studio model also limits the industrial scale and flexibility of its workforce.

The two experts concluded that India's micro-drama market has enormous growth potential and will continue to learn from China's mature industrial iteration experience. Nevertheless, only by breaking free from simply copying models, cultivating localized content systems and accelerating technological upgrading can the sector achieve sustainable and high-quality development in India.