YouTube Stars, Bollywood-Inspired Videos In This Chhattisgarh Village
NDTV
YouTube pays creators for content after their channel registers at least 1,000 subscribers and secures 4,000 hours of watched content over 12 months.
A man sporting a black cap and pink T-shirt sits on a bullock cart, pile of grass behind him, and busts a rhyme to a camera while riding across the dusty streets of India's Tulsi village.
The hip-hop video is just one of many home-grown, Bollywood-inspired productions being created for the village's flagship YouTube channel, which boasts nearly 120,000 subscribers and has more than 200 uploaded videos.
Inspired by videos seen in the streaming service, Gyanendra Shukla and Jai Verma set up the "Being Chhattisgarhiya" channel in 2018 as mobile Internet service became cheaper in India. They have both given up their day jobs to focus on the channel.
Residents got increasingly involved as a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 put many out of work, and now about a third of them participate in some form of content creation for YouTube, from acting to post-production work.
