New Delhi, July 10 -- NEW DELHI - India can track its GDP to three decimal places, measure rainfall to the millimetre, and rank its cities by pollution index. Yet the country has no formal framework to quantify how its 2,000-year cultural inheritance translates into economic weight, social capital, or international standing.

That absence was placed squarely on the table this week at the Visvaniti Foundation's 1st Annual Meeting, held at The Grand in New Delhi. The gathering brought together cultural practitioners, policy architects, and institutional leaders to examine what India's creative sector lacks, not in output, but in the tools of accountability and measurement.

Founded to bridge the distance between India's living cultural trad...