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 The camera has been replaced by a spade.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.