The “toys” most in demand in India, today at least, are the garishly coloured powders that will be thrown around in copious quantities to celebrate the festival of Holi. Cheap and cheerful, costing just a few rupees a bag, they are all that a parent - not to mention a child – could ask for. Indeed, a good number of adults will be buying the powders for themselves.

For much of the rest of the year, however, Indian youngsters are not so different from their British peers. A straw poll of Bombay’s youth conducted by The Times found that Pooja, 15, wanted an iPod; Amur, 10, asked for a GameBoy.

Mattel, the multinational giant, and Funskool India, which is backed by Hasbro, are the two most visible brands.

As with many things Indian, however, the country’s toy business has several twists that risk bamboozling unwary outsiders. The chief bane is the large number of unregistered and unregulated manufacturers, which account for as much as half the market and brazenly flout copyright laws and safety standards.

The most striking recent trend, meanwhile, has been the way toymakers in India have tied up with the country’s newly established children’s television broadcasters. Mattel and Funskool have long-term deals with Time Warner’s Cartoon Network, Disney’s Hungama and Viacom’s Nickelodeon. As in the UK, selling plastic figurines marketed by daily TV plugs has proved hugely lucrative.

The evolution of the children’s TV market holds a lesson for new entrants to the toy business. In 2004, UTV, the Bombay-based media group, launched its own children’s channel against two rivals run by global giants – Disney and Time Warner. Armed with little more than a couple of dubbed Japanese animated series and one self-produced Hindi show, UTV breezed past its international competitors to take the top spot.

The lesson: a little local nous goes a long way.

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