Trending Now

What Does A Day On A Kannada Film Set Pay? Nobody Will Tell You, And That Is The Story.

Telugu film workers struck last year over a rate card everyone could see. Karnataka has a new welfare law, a new cess starting Tuesday, and no published wage schedule at all. We went looking for the number.

Here is a question that should have a boring answer. On a Kannada film shooting in Bengaluru this week, what does a light boy get paid for the day?

We went looking. There is no published rate card. There is no single federation that negotiates one. There is no state wage schedule for film production that we could locate. On Tuesday, Karnataka starts collecting a two percent cess on every cinema ticket in the state to fund welfare for these workers, and the state has built that fund without ever publishing what the workers are paid.

The absence is the story.

What It Looks Like When Someone Does Publish

Go one state north and the numbers are on the record, because in August 2025 the Telugu Film Industry Employees Federation stopped work until they were.

Per Deccan Chronicle, the daily rates in the Telugu industry at the time of the strike were:

  • Unskilled workers: ₹1,250 a day
  • Mid-tier workers: ₹2,500 a day
  • Skilled workers: ₹3,500 a day

The federation wanted thirty percent, which would have taken those to ₹1,625, ₹3,250 and ₹4,550. It also wanted same-day payment, which tells you something about how often that was not happening.

Per The South First, thousands of workers across 24 categories stopped: lighting technicians, set assistants, camera operators, make-up artists. Shoots halted.

The Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce called the demand “unviable, particularly for small and mid-budget filmmakers” and passed a resolution allowing producers to hire non-union workers if the strike continued. Which is a lockout with better manners.

The federation’s position was one sentence: “With ticket price hikes and OTT platforms raking in crores, a 30 percent raise is only fair.”

The Comparison Somebody Called Unwarranted

In the same reporting, leading Telugu actors were noted as charging between ₹80 crore and ₹120 crore a film. Top directors, ₹25 crore to ₹40 crore.

Producer B.V.S.N. Prasad rejected the juxtaposition directly: “Bringing superstar salaries into comparison with worker wages is unwarranted.” His argument was that stars earned their position over years, and that comparing them to entry-level pay is like comparing a chief executive to a new hire.

It is a reasonable argument and it is worth stating properly before doing the arithmetic anyway.

At ₹1,250 a day, an unskilled film worker earning every single day with no rest and no gap between projects would need roughly 64,000 working days to earn ₹80 crore. That is about 175 years.

Nobody works every day. Film work is project work. Between two shoots there is nothing.

Now Karnataka

Tamil Nadu has FEFSI, a federation of 23 affiliated unions representing roughly 25,000 workers, with a strike history going back to 1997 and a hunger strike involving around 5,000 members in 2012 over revised wages, per its public record.

Telangana has a federation that can halt every shoot in the state for a fortnight.

Karnataka has a Film Chamber, a set of individual craft associations, and no comparable single bargaining body that we could identify, and consequently no negotiated rate card in public circulation.

What Karnataka does have is a general statutory minimum wage. Under the notification effective 22 May 2026, Zone 1, which covers the Greater Bengaluru Authority area, the rates are ₹25,714 a month or ₹989 a day for unskilled work, ₹28,285 or ₹1,088 for semi-skilled, and ₹31,114 or ₹1,197 for skilled.

Note what those numbers do next to the Telugu film rates. Karnataka’s general unskilled minimum of ₹989 sits about 21 percent below what the Telugu film industry was already paying its unskilled workers before the strike. Karnataka’s skilled minimum of ₹1,197 is roughly a third of the Telugu skilled film rate of ₹3,500.

That comparison is not apples to apples and we are not going to pretend it is. A general state minimum is a floor for all industry. A negotiated film rate is a sector agreement. But the floor is the only published number Karnataka has for this work, and the gap between a state floor and a neighbouring state’s sector rate is the space where a Kannada crew member’s pay actually sits. Nobody has told us where in that space.

The Law That Arrived Without The Number

The Karnataka Cine and Cultural Activists (Welfare) Act, 2024 received the Governor’s assent on 23 September 2024. It is a genuinely broad piece of drafting. A covered person is anyone employed in relation to cinema as an artist, including actor, musician or dancer, or performing work that is skilled, unskilled, manual, supervisory, technical or artistic.

The Act permits a cess of not less than one percent and not more than two percent on cinema tickets, subscription fees and related establishment revenue. The government notified two percent. It starts on 30 September.

The draft Rules of 2025 set eligibility at ages 18 to 60, create a digital registration portal and ID cards valid three years, and list benefits: accident cover for death or disability, natural death assistance including funeral expenses, and medical reimbursement. Reporting by The South First on the Act adds educational support for children, maternity aid and pensions.

Read that list again and notice its shape. It covers catastrophe. Accident, death, illness, funeral.

It does not cover the ordinary condition of the work, which is that there is no work. A welfare fund that pays out when you are injured and not when you are idle has addressed the dramatic risk and left the structural one alone.

Five Seats Out Of Twenty

Here is the detail in the Act that deserves more attention than it has received.

The Board that administers this fund is chaired by the Minister in charge of Labour, vice-chaired by the Additional Chief Secretary or Principal Secretary for Labour, with the Labour Commissioner as Member-Secretary. It has 17 nominated members.

Of those 17: five are workers, including two women. Seven are academy representatives. Five are government department representatives.

So on a board of twenty running a fund built entirely from a levy raised in the name of film workers, workers hold five seats. A quarter.

The Act does require at least one-third of nominated members to be women, which is a better provision than most Indian statutory boards manage, and it should be said.

The Penalty Is A Rounding Error

Establishment owners must deposit the cess by the tenth of the following month and file half-yearly returns.

Non-compliance carries a penalty of up to ₹10,000 for a first violation and up to ₹1 lakh for subsequent ones.

For a single-screen operator in Chitradurga, ₹10,000 is real money. For a national multiplex chain, a maximum first-offence penalty of ₹10,000 against a two percent levy on Karnataka ticket revenue is not a deterrent. It is a line item, and a cheaper one than compliance.

The Economics Underneath All Of This

None of the above happens in a healthy industry, and the Kannada numbers are difficult.

Per The Federal, 227 Kannada films released in 2024 and eight were commercial successes. That is a success rate of about three and a half percent, up from around two percent in 2023 and down from eight percent in 2022. The industry generated around ₹1,570 crore in 2022 and carried estimated losses of around ₹520 crore in 2024.

Roughly 219 films lost money in a single year. Every one of them had a crew.

That is the honest context for the producers’ side of this argument, and it is why a thirty percent demand in Telangana was met with the word unviable rather than a counter-offer. In an industry where ninety-six percent of releases fail commercially, the crew wage is one of the few costs a producer can actually compress.

It is also why leaving the rate unpublished suits almost everybody with power in the arrangement.

What We Could Not Find

In the interest of being straight about it: we could not locate a published Karnataka wage schedule for film production, a KFCC-negotiated rate card in the public domain, a count of registered cine workers in the state, or confirmation that film production appears among the 81 scheduled employments in Karnataka’s minimum wage notification.

Any of those may exist. If they do, they are not where a member of the public would look for them, which for a fund financed by a levy on the public is a problem in itself.

Bengaluru Baath Take

Karnataka has done the hard part. It passed a law with an unusually wide definition of who counts, it survived a High Court challenge on procedure, it gazetted the Act properly, and from Tuesday it collects.

Then it stopped short of the easy part, which is telling anybody what the work is worth.

Three things would fix most of this and none of them require new legislation. Publish the registration numbers, so we know how many workers the fund is actually for. Publish a film-specific wage schedule, or state plainly that the general minimum applies and enforce it. And publish the Board’s first year of accounts, so the two rupees on every hundred-rupee ticket can be traced from the counter to a person.

Telangana’s workers found out what they were worth by stopping work for a fortnight. Karnataka’s workers should not have to.

We will keep asking. If you work on a Kannada set and you know the real number, we would like to hear from you.

Sources

  • Most Popular
  • Read More