On July 20, Women Film Circuit (WFC), a collective founded in 2021 to support and empower women in the film industry, submitted a formal complaint to the Screenwriters Association (SWA) regarding the growing exploitation of writers involved in the production of micro dramas. Running between one and three minutes, micro dramas are a new content format developed primarily for platforms like Instagram. According to WFC founder Sulagna Chatterjee, writers working on these short-form digital series are being paid as little as Rs 1000-Rs 2000 per episode. Chatterjee points out that after creating an entire micro drama, say comprising 90 episodes, a writer is paid anywhere between Rs 90,000 and Rs 1.8 lakh. This is in contrast to SWA’s Minimum Basic Contract rate, which mandates that a writer should be paid Rs 12 lakh minimum for a full project that has a budget of less than Rs 5 crore.  

Chatterjee, who has penned Code M (2020) and Feels Like Ishq (2021), says there is a boom in demand for writers for vertical format content. Unfortunately, the demand hasn’t translated to fair pay. “A major production house that was getting into micro dramas offered me Rs 3500 per episode. They said, ‘We’re offering you this because you have experience’. But that’s incredibly low for the amount of work involved. You’re [condensing] a 90-minute feature film into a micro drama, where every single minute has to have structure, tone, and a cliffhanger. There is no clarity about the number of rewrites expected,” she states.