A double-whammy on the economic front
By Venkatesh Raghavan
The Mumbai circuit is right now facing a crisis level situation on multiple counts following the prolonged lockdown precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Having dealt with the throes faced by the hospitality industry and the other labour-intensive industry, namely textiles, the next focus for this second part is going to be how Mumbai’s money spinner Bollywood and the host of software parks that abound in commercial areas are faring under this rough weather.
The tinsel world in Mumbai till recently was facing a double-whammy on the economic front. Being hard-pressed for conforming to distancing norms, film shooting, be it outdoors or indoors has almost been crippled. Makhrand Marathe a dedicated film maker has been confined to his home premises in Mulund for over six months. His wife, Santoshee, a freelance journalist has restricted herself to a domestic role of mentoring her daughter who is forced to focus on online tutorials from her school.
Also read: Beneath the sheen of the tinsel town-1
Makhrand spoke about the difficulties of coordinating for any location or even managing the logistics to ensure smooth production of the shooting unit. Film shootings on the sets might get the waiver to resume as many of the fraternity like Makhrand have confined themselves to scripting. On the second count, the movie makers are expecting relief from the government which has announced its intentions to throw open movie houses or multiplexes to the public with the constraint that only 50% capacity can be utilized. Both the theatre-owners and filmmakers welcome this proposal from the state government. However, given the short-lived span for the current film releases, return on investment will not be all that easy.
In short, there will be no more money spinner stories about successful films crossing the Rs 100 crores mark in the first week or say even a break-even situation. If money coffers continue to remain thin, this will also affect the back-end people including the stars, the spot boys, the stuntmen, the extras, cameramen, and other ancillary staff as their remuneration will take a severe beating. From a macro perspective, Bollywood will be faced with an acute revenue crunch both on the funding and sustenance fronts. So far, the industry has reported colossal losses owing to the complete shutdown of cinema screens not only in Mumbai but also pan India.
If the film industry has its brim of woes, the software sector in the city too is operating on a below capacity level. It’s important to understand that the cliched perception about software professionals being able to work from home is untrue. Project manager Priya Kadam explained that within a project there are a lot of dependencies between say the testing team, the graphic team, the animators and the content managers. This warrants the presence of all members of the project team to ensure perfect coordination of all tasks and ease of interpersonal communication for swift decision making.
To make a long story short, only those software projects that can be managed with minimum dependencies get executed and furthermore, the costing is also suffering as the project timelines get stretched. The timeline issue has also resulted in many projects getting out of hand and passing on to software companies from competitor countries. Software being a resource-driven industry cannot take relief from automation or robotics as is the case with factory floor shops. Though the exact figure of revenue losses is difficult to estimate owing to the presence of several software firms in the unorganized sector, it is reported that more than thousands of crores of rupees have gone down the drain.
To sum up our second part, Mumbai which continues to be a host for myriad financial activities is awaiting to limp back to the pre-Covid normalcy levels with both labour and capital flow taking a severe beating.
