Vinod Ranganath wants royalties for screenwriters. Step 1 is convincing them to join

Fourteen years after a new copyright law gave screenwriters a legal claim to royalties when their work was used beyond the cinema hall, the cheque arrived. All the way from Chile. The next in line is Uruguay.

But before the money can reach writers, they have to join the newly formed, ambitious copyright society, the Screenwriters Rights Association of India (SRAI). And not all of them want to.

That is the current headache of Vinod Ranganath, the CEO of the society. Widely remembered for Swabhimaan, the Mahesh Bhatt-helmed afternoon daily soap that became one of Doordarshan’s most remembered shows of the 1990s, Ranganath’s work these days is less about writing scenes and more about building systems for writers.

“I’m the only person working. I’ve stopped my writing career of 33 years, and I’m setting this up,” he told ThePrint.

His is largely an invisible, often thankless, fight. But in a film industry infamous for only paying its big stars handsomely and neglecting all other cogs in the wheel, Ranganath’s battle is a long time coming. It seeks to end the invisibility of the movie script writer. The demand itself is not new: writers’ groups and senior screenwriters had pushed for royalty rights around the 2012 Copyright Amendment. The SRAI was formed in 2013, but its registration as a copyright society came only in December 2024.

For decades, Indian screenwriters were paid once for a film or show, even if that work later travelled to television, streaming platforms, overseas markets, or reruns. The 2012 Copyright Act Amendment changed that somewhat. SRAI’s registration as a copyright society on 30 December 2024 gave them, for the first time, a collective body that can negotiate tariffs, collect royalties, receive money from foreign copyright societies, and distribute it to writers and their legal heirs.

A part of this system has already started moving. Copyright societies in Uruguay, France, and Australia have sent SRAI lists of Indian films and shows watched in those countries, along with records of possible royalties attached to them.

These lists have now turned a legal breakthrough into quite a bit of paperwork.

The writer building the system

For Ranganath, it all begins with one question: How many members can he enlist? That is his first steep climb. Ironically, the group of people he is fighting for have been the hardest to woo.

SRAI currently has around 680 members. From the lists already received from foreign societies, Ranganath estimates that around 500-600 writers and 10 legal heirs who may be entitled to royalties are still not members.

To become a member, a writer has to pay a one-time fee of about Rs 6,600, which includes GST, e-KYC, e-signing, and deed-related costs. For a society trying to convince writers that royalties are finally real, even that amount has become part of the hesitation.

Some are asking how much they will get before they even register. “The question is not ‘How much will I get’. The fact is that you are going to get a bonus for work you have done, when it is monetised in other mediums. The importance of that is something which people are not able to understand or they are not able to believe,” Ranganath said.

It is a strange position for a copyright society to be in: the first royalty payment has arrived, but Ranganath still has to convince some writers that the system is real enough to enter.

For him, this is where the legal victory turns into daily labour. The copyright society is still in its nascent stage, but it is already dealing with foreign societies, membership forms, title lists, legal heirs, credits, and claims.

Each list means days of work before SRAI can even receive the money. A title has to be identified. The writer credit has to be checked. If a film has separate story, screenplay, and dialogue writers, the share has to be worked out. If the writer is dead, the heir has to be traced. But all of this is immaterial unless the writer or legal heir becomes a member. Without that membership, SRAI is not entitled to claim or receive the royalty on their behalf.

“This entire business is all about data. Collecting data, verifying data, processing it through various protocols. It’s a whole lot of number-punching,” he said.

The foreign lists show the scale of the afterlife Indian films and shows already have. But for SRAI, they also show the scale of the gap.

The Chile list has 11 titles. The one from France has about 100 titles, Uruguay about 6,000 titles, Australia+NZ, about 40.

That is why Ranganath’s first fight is not in court or across a negotiating table. It is with records, membership forms, credits, and calls to writers who may have money waiting for them, but have not yet signed up.

And the calls are only one part of the battle. SRAI also has to make the Indian market accept that screenwriting royalties are now part of the cost of using films and shows.

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