India | New platform supports the creative sector in South Asia

Just launched Festivals From India, an India–UK arts and culture project, is a digital portal that exhibits hundreds of Indian arts and cultural festivals and is intended to promote art, cultural diversity, and community building.

The platform features festivals from all around India, in a variety of genres such as arts and crafts, design, dance, film, folk arts, food and culinary arts, heritage, literature, interdisciplinary arts, music, new media, photography, theatre, and visual arts. It also features online festivals that can be seen by audiences from anywhere.

But more than just an aggregation of festivals, the platform is also intended to support and connect the creative sector, by providing resources to festival organisers looking to make their event more accessible or helping them to find a job.

South Asia Festivals Academy

One of the features of the platform is the South Asia Festivals Academy, developed by the British Council, in partnership with Edinburgh Napier University, in response to the growth in independent and established arts and culture festivals. The Academy provides a number of short online courses.

Festival managers in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka can learn about international programming and curation; leadership and governance; financial management, operations and staffing; marketing and audience development; risk management and health and safety; equality, diversity and inclusion; and environmental sustainability. The courses aim to strengthen the arts and culture festival sector through provision of skills, capacity building and knowledge sharing with experts and festival leaders from the UK and region.