In September 2010, Conde Nast readers voted India as the world’s seventh best luxury destination. Every year, India’s Tourism Ministry spends heavily on its “Incredible India” campaign, with this average year’s budget being around INR2.8 billion. Bollywood, as the Hindi film industry is popularly known, is the largest contributor to the industry’s revenue, followed by the South Indian movie industry and other language cinema industries such as Bengali, Bhojpuri, Marathi and Gujarati. Following factors can help to promote India as a location for shooting films:

• diverse landscape with nice road access
• amazing traditional & cultural heritage
• low cost excellent skilled technicians
• technology support from film industry
• logistic support from tourism industry

The world views India as a country with rich cultural heritage and people want to get to know it better. Worldwide, India is viewed as a spiritual destination. India has a relatively new visual landscape and innumerable unexplored locations that can be ideal locales for shooting foreign films. Filmmakers can explore the country’s rich diversity, its various cultural groups and different terrains including beaches, deserts and mountains.

India can offer talented crew to assist in film-making at a comparatively low cost. The country has world-class post-production capabilities including VFX, 3D and animation, which has lead to an increase in outsourcing of post-production services to it. India has well-developed post production facilities available at a low cost. A foreign producer, who comes to shoot a film in India, can complete his entire movie in the country, from shooting to post- production, to cut costs substantially. For example, Indian post-production company Prime Focus has worked on 200 visual effects for James Cameron’s Avatar, one of Hollywood’s largest “grosser” ever.