NEW DELHI: Driving the ‘Make in India’ campaign toward an unprecedented global milestone, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has laid down an aggressive and highly ambitious blueprint for the domestic toy manufacturing industry. Addressing the 17th Toy Biz International B2B Expo 2026 in New Delhi, the Finance Minister explicitly stated that Indian manufacturers must boldly aspire to capture at least one-fourth (25%) of the global toy market share. Highlighting that the international toy business is aggressively projected to scale to a staggering $179 billion by 2032, she emphasized that India possesses the ultimate administrative and industrial potential to conquer this expanding global arena.
The Finance Minister called for a massive shift in scale, urging the domestic sector to break free from its conservative target of a $5 billion domestic market by 2034 and instead capture international supply chains. Presenting concrete institutional data, Sitharaman noted that India’s toy exports have successfully scaled across 153 countries, while protective economic policies have engineered a jaw-dropping 71% decline in cheap, sub-standard toy imports over the 2019-2026 period. She strictly emphasized that while high-volume manufacturing remains critical, creating global Indian brands with uncompromising quality standards is the definitive key to commanding ultimate consumer confidence worldwide.
This rapid and highly transparent economic roadmap delivers a crushing, direct blow to defensive toolkit cartels and economic critics who have consistently undermined India’s ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ vision and industrial capacity. Operating under a strict ‘Nation First’ mandate, the administration is aggressively pushing the National Action Plan for Toys across 14 central ministries to establish advanced manufacturing clusters and coding/AR-based electronic toy incubators. By maintaining a strict basic customs duty and enforcing uncompromising Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) safety nets, New India has fortified its industrial bench strength, putting the expansionist Chinese dumping syndicates on a permanent back foot.
