Technology & Society
Lights, Camera, Unemployment: The Rise and Fall of India’s YouTube Village — and What Came After
A village in Chhattisgarh became the symbol of rural India’s digital dream. Then the views fell, the studio emptied, and the panchayat moved in. The story of Tulsi — and the millions of young Indians still pointing their phones at the world — is about far more than YouTube.
The signboard still says “HamaarFlix,” painted in a Netflix-style font on a dusty wall in the village of Tulsi, about 50 kilometres from Raipur. A YouTube logo — bright red, slightly faded — sits beside it. Inside, where cameras and editing computers once hummed, there is now a broken LCD monitor gathering dust in a locked room. The studio that cost Rs 25 lakh, built in 2023 by a Raipur collector who wanted to turn a digital dream into something permanent, is most days used as a meeting room where panchayat members shuffle paperwork and drink tea.
Just outside, 61-year-old Pyarelal Verma, who spent years in front of a camera as a regular face on the village’s YouTube channel, is back in his fields. The camera has been replaced by a spade. The like button, by soil.
This is what the end of India’s most-watched rural content experiment looks like, up close. But the story of Tulsi is not really about failure. It is about something more complicated — about what happens when an entire generation, staring at a job market that cannot absorb them, turns its gaze toward the only screen it can reach, and begins to film the wait.
I. The Rise: When a Village Became a Capital
It began, as most things in the internet economy begin, with someone having a go. In 2018, Jai Verma — a chemistry tutor — and his friend Gyanendra Shukla, who worked at the State Bank of India, launched a YouTube channel called “Being Chhattisgarhiya.” They made comedy sketches: parodies of the popular TV show CID, skits about village life and exam stress, and local humour inspired by the kind of content The Viral Fever (TVF) was making famous in cities.
The channel grew. Locals acted in the videos. Neighbours watched. The subscriber count climbed past 1.28 lakh. Views accumulated past 2.78 crore. Word spread. More channels launched. At its peak in 2024, over 40 YouTube channels operated from this single village of 4,000 people. “Being Chhattisgarhiya,” “36 Garhiya,” “Alwa Jalwa,” “Fun Tapri,” “Gold CG04” — they made sketch videos and local music and earned through ad revenue and brand deals. A quarter of Tulsi’s residents had, at some point, stepped in front of a camera.
The media noticed. In 2023, Tulsi was dubbed India’s “YouTube capital.” A local collector installed the Rs 25-lakh studio. For a brief, extraordinary period, it looked like content creation might be a genuine rural economy — not just a hobby, not just a side hustle, but work that kept the lights on and put cash in pockets in a village where the nearest alternative was a shift in a cement or power plant.
What Is the “Creator Economy”?
When Attention Becomes a Business Model
The creator economy is the system by which individuals — rather than studios, newspapers, or broadcast companies — produce content and earn money from it. The money comes from three main sources: advertising revenue shared by platforms (YouTube pays creators based on how many people watch their videos); brand deals (a company pays a creator to mention or feature their product); and direct payments from audiences (subscriptions, tips, memberships). Entry costs are low — you need a phone and an internet connection. But earning enough to live on requires either a very large audience, a very loyal niche one, or both. The gap between the two is where most creators spend most of their time.
II. The Fall: When the Algorithm Moved On
Then the views dropped.
The collapse, by Jai Verma’s own account, came from two directions at once. First, the platforms changed. Instagram and YouTube began aggressively promoting short-form content — Reels and YouTube Shorts — rewarding videos that run under 60 seconds over the longer sketch comedy that Tulsi’s creators had built their audiences on. The channels did not adapt fast enough. “Our biggest mistake was our inability to switch to Reels and short-form,” said Jai, now 33 and unemployed after a stint with the Election Commission. “Gradually, we stopped getting content ideas and even the villagers slowly lost interest.”
The second direction was internal. Co-creator Shukla now works factory shifts. Channels that once carried dozens of collaborators fell quiet as the collaborative energy dissipated. The brand deals — which had provided the real money — vanished alongside the falling view counts. “Being Chhattisgarhiya” lies stagnant. Most of the 40 channels have gone dark. The people who acted in the videos have returned to fields and daily wage work.
The Rs 25-lakh studio, built as a statement of faith in rural digital aspiration, now functions as a panchayat office.
III. The Timepass Generation, Upgraded
To understand why Tulsi happened, and why hundreds of towns across India are living through their own version of it right now, it helps to go back to a book published in 2010.
Academic Craig Jeffrey spent years studying the young men of northern India — graduates who could not find work, who spent their days at tea stalls and college canteens and village crossroads, passing time in the particular listless way of people whose education has outrun the economy’s ability to employ them. He called his book Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India.
What Is “Timepass”?
The Politics of Having Nothing to Do
In India, “timepass” is a colloquial phrase for killing time — chatting, loitering, doing nothing in particular. Craig Jeffrey used it to describe a generation of educated young men who were stuck between two worlds: educated enough to expect formal employment, but in an economy that couldn’t provide it. They were not lazy. They were waiting. Jeffrey’s insight was that this waiting was not passive — it was a economic condition, produced by policy failures and structural inequalities, and it carried its own dignity and coping mechanisms. The “timepass generation” of 2010 spent its days at tea stalls. The timepass generation of 2026 films it and uploads it. The waiting is the same. The medium has changed.
The numbers tell the story with uncomfortable precision. Graduate unemployment in India stands at 29.1 per cent according to a 2024 International Labour Organization report. A March 2026 study by Azim Premji University found that nearly 40 per cent of graduates between 15 and 25 are unemployed. Meanwhile, a 2025 Ernst & Young report found that Indians spend an average of five hours per day on their smartphones — up sharply from 3.3 hours in 2023.
These two facts — rising unemployment and rising screen time — are not a coincidence. They are the same phenomenon, measured from different angles. As the job market contracts, time and aspiration are redirected toward the only arena where the barriers to entry are low and the theoretical upside is high: the phone screen, the camera, the upload button.
IV. The People Who Are Making It Work — and Why
The most important distinction in the creator economy is not between those who succeed and those who fail. It is between those who treat content as the product and those who treat content as the tool.
Tikeshwar Verma, 24, is the exception that proves the rule in Tulsi. While most of his village’s creators were chasing virality with sketch comedy and local humour, Tikeshwar was posting videos of battery repairs and electric vehicle maintenance from his small shop on the village outskirts. The shop is called TikTechEV. So is the YouTube channel. The two are indistinguishable.
Customers from Maharashtra to Chhattisgarh call him because they found him on YouTube. He earns around Rs 35,000 a month — sometimes a lakh — at least twice the income of his peers on factory shifts nearby. He is not trying to become an influencer. He is using YouTube the way an earlier generation used a signboard or a classified ad: to tell people what he does and where to find him.
“I still do my regular job, but content creation has helped me market it better,” he says. “It’s ultimately about knowing how to use it efficiently.”
Three Creators, Three Approaches — Vidisha and Raipur
Vijay Bairagi, 29 — Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh. Former security supervisor. Pandemic closed his fast-food outlet. Started an Instagram page to share Covid alerts for oxygen and blood. The followers came. He turned it into a local advertising platform — “Vidisha Shahar” — charging shops, clinics, and restaurants Rs 5,000 to Rs 8,000 per Reel. 1.3 lakh followers. Steady but unpredictable. His widowed mother bought him his first iPhone to support the pivot. His sister and aunt have since joined, gaining thousands of followers of their own.
Ashmeet Kaur Sethi, 23 — Vidisha. Failed her CA foundation exam in 2021. Cleared it the next year but didn’t go back to accounting, because by then her food vlogging page “Cravings 24 Seven” had started earning. “There was nobody from a small town like Vidisha reviewing food here,” she says. “I grew because I had a hyper-local feel.” She now earns Rs 6,000 to 8,000 per Reel, sometimes Rs 1 lakh in a good month. She is also pursuing an MBA — because even the people who are making money in this space keep a back door open.
Pratibha Sahu, 20 — Raipur. Fifty-four thousand Instagram followers in a year. BSc degree. No backup plan. Her content is deliberately cosmopolitan — she calls her aesthetic a “SoBo girl” (South Bombay), deliberately divorced from the hyperlocal feel that works for Ashmeet. The dream is Mumbai. She has no plans to pivot. She is the youngest of the three and the only one not hedging her bets.
V. The Parallel Economy Nobody Planned For
One of the less-told stories inside the creator boom is the informal ecosystem it has generated around itself. For every creator making a Reel, there are usually one or two other young people helping them make it: editing footage, operating cameras, writing scripts. Most of them are self-taught. Almost all are under 25. None of them have contracts.
In Bhopal, food vlogger Kawalpreet Kaur Kalsi — a BCom graduate who earns significantly more from brand collaborations than from any sales job she could have taken — employs two young editors from rural Rajasthan for filming and post-production. “It’s creating a parallel industry of people who may not be professionally trained, but self-taught,” she says.
The industry is real. It is also entirely informal. No contracts. No fixed salaries. No continuity guaranteed. Work flows in and out with trends, followers, and the mood of an algorithm calibrated to serve a platform’s quarterly revenue, not a village’s employment rate.
VI. The Math That Most People Don’t Want to Hear
The endgame many imagine — the leap from local Reels to national fame, from bedroom videos to a business like Kusha Kapila’s — is real, but vanishingly rare. Indore-based hiring consultant Tarun, who sees 60 to 70 per cent of Gen Z applicants come to him with some content creation experience on their CVs, still tells them to take BPO jobs. “It pays Rs 15,000 to 20,000, there’s no glamour, but it’s stable,” he says. Even those jobs, he adds, are becoming harder to find.
Entrepreneur Akshay Hunka, who founded the “Berozgaar Sena” in Madhya Pradesh, estimates from his campaign work that at least 70 per cent of the state’s youth is unemployed. “People want stability,” he says. “What percent of people can actually strike success through YouTube or Instagram? Just because it looks so appealing, doesn’t mean it is.”
In Tulsi, the panchayat has moved into the studio. Outside, Pyarelal Verma works his fields. Jai Verma sits in a rented room in Raipur, reassessing. Gyanendra Shukla works factory shifts. Not far away, Tikeshwar Verma props his phone against a toolbox and films another battery repair between customers.
These are not two different stories. They are the same story, at different stages. The creator economy, in small-town India, is not delivering what it promised — not consistently, not at scale, not for the millions who need it most. But it is doing something. For the Tikeshwars, it is a tool. For the Vijays, it is a livelihood with uncertain edges. For the Pratibhas, it is a dream, unhedged. For the Jais and the Gyanendras, it was all of these things, briefly, until it wasn’t.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.