Hashi Mridha from Barrackpore had once toyed with the idea of joining the Indian Army or becoming a professional footballer. The 19-year-old has now changed her mind. The elder of two siblings, Hashi appeared for her Class XII boards in 2024, but she is yet to join college. The last many months, she has been making reels. “My mother wakes up at 4am and goes to work every day. I want to earn enough so that my mother never has to work again,” says Hashi. “I earn about ₹400 to ₹500 every now and then. Once my following increases, I will be able to earn more,” she adds.

Hashi started making reels when she was in Class X. She would use the family smartphone for it; she, her younger brother and her mother shared one phone. When that too got stolen, she would borrow a neighbour’s phone. “But then they started to get annoyed,” says Hashi. That did not stop her from pursuing a career in social media. Eventually, with a bank loan and her savings, she bought a smartphone.

A group of young friends laughing and posing while creating reels of their fun moments at the Prinsep Ghat area, capturing lively memories on their mobile phones on Saturday evening, July 26, 2025.

Hashi’s reels are 10-15 second videos of herself, belting out cheeky two-liners. Every punchline is accompanied by a soundtrack and special effects.

Hashi is not alone. Ashutosh Mukhia and his wife Soheli, a couple from West Midnapore, shoot reels daily. They lip-sync to old Bengali film songs. Ashutosh says, “We have seen other couples make reels for a living.” While he himself works odd jobs by day, making reels is all that Soheli does when she is not doing her home chores. There is no income yet but they are hopeful.

Hope is contagious. Laxmi Mandal, a middle-aged toilet cleaner in an office in New Town, has been making reels for some years now. She says, “My daughter-in-law makes reels and gets plenty of likes and shares. She earns from it too.” Almost every day after work, Laxmi touches up her makeup and makes reels of herself lip syncing to Asha Bhosle’s hit numbers. She says, “When I start making an income from reels, I will
stop working.”

It takes one catchy reel to become famous. And so you have a variety of them flooding social media. A middle-aged woman mimicking a nosy neighbour, a father and son trying out bizarre combinations of food and rating them for the viewers, a mother and son whipping up quaint recipes.

A group of youngsters posing while creating reels of their memorable moments on the train tracks at the Prinsep Ghat area, capturing lively memories on their mobile phones on Saturday evening, July 26, 2025.

Vandana Vasudevan, who has written the recently published book OTP Please!, says, “While working on my book, I learnt that in rural areas, young people are no longer willing to work as farm hands or perform manual labour.” She continues, “Those of them from a slightly disadvantaged economic class are moving away from regulated, structured work and getting into gig work instead. I suppose doing some work, getting paid for it and then moving on is what they prefer now, which is precisely how a career in social media works.”

She tells The Telegraph she has seen young people break into catchy hook steps with a smartphone on the roads of Munnar. She talks about a young food delivery boy she met in Hyderabad: “He told me he is planning to open a YouTube channel, with the help of his connections in the regional film industry.”

Indeed, for Shourjashish Samanta, a 23-year-old final-year engineering student, a 9-to-5 tech job is his Plan B. Plan A is to make reels. He says, “About two years ago, when I got my bike, I started making reels with it. Some of those clocked a few million views.”

A group of youngsters posing while creating reels of their memorable moments on the train tracks at the Prinsep Ghat area, capturing lively memories on their mobile phones on Saturday evening, July 26, 2025.

Shourjashish has just started earning from his videos, but he won’t tell us how much. According to him and some of the others that The Telegraph interviewed, reel-makers are contractually bound by social media platforms to not disclose how much they earn.

Anusree from Nazirpur in Nadia is a frenetic reel-maker now but she had always wanted to become a television actress. While her early life in North Dinajpur and later in Nadia did not support that dream, her social media career has more than made up for it. She posts lip-syncing videos and video-blogs about her daily life with her newborn baby and her husband. She says, “It’s not so easy to earn from Facebook anymore, but what I earn is definitely more than what a schoolteacher makes in a month.”

Soumen Chakraborty, a physics teacher at Garh Bhawanipur R.P. Institution in Howrah, has taken up content creation as his side hustle. He says, “I make reels about basic physics concepts.” Why one should add salt to water while boiling eggs, how to take precautions against thunderstorms and so on. He adds, “Once you have a steady following, upwards of 20,000, you can easily make an income out of it.”

The Internet works as a great equaliser. People share their daily lives as content. Rachana Biswas from Nadia makes content about farming, fishing in brackish water and her life among it all. A delivery boy makes get-ready-with-me reels.

There does not seem to be a steady formula for virality, which almost always translates into handsome earnings. But the general belief seems to be — keep at it and you will go viral, and once you do, there will be no looking back.

For some people, that does seem to be the case. “My father had a sweet shop in Mohanpur village of West Midnapore, but we went out of business during the pandemic,” says Suprabha Bishayee, owner of the viral YouTube channel
@Olddays_kitchen. At the time, Suprabha was pursuing a hotel management programme. He says, “I dropped out of college. Next, we sold our house
and started living in the shop. Once we had repaid all loans, we were left with ₹2 lakh.”

With that money, Suprabha purchased an iPhone. He says, “I started posting videos of my mother’s cooking. We came up with a funny catchphrase. Within a month, we had one lakh followers on Instagram and within a year, we had one million YouTube followers too.” It took them a few months to monetise their content. Social media is their family venture now. Suprabha writes the scripts, while his mother cooks on camera, and his father looks after the finances.

There are scores of others. Dibyendu Das of Gangasagar makes ₹10,000 per month from his promotional posts on jatra. He says, “I used to bunk classes to watch jatra. Once I became a known face, one of the organisers asked me to post trailer reels on social media.” He created his Facebook page Jatra Sagar. That was two years ago. Now, Dibyendu has 83,000 followers on Facebook. Then there is Kushal Das, a Calcutta-based makeup artist; he and his mother have an income from food reels.

Oldays Kitchen, a food vlog by Usha Bishoyee. Courtesy: Oldays Kitchen

Economist Anup Sinha says, “Our youth is taking up a career in social media precisely because there is a promise of pay, you can’t deny that.” He adds, “It is a reflection of the dire state of our job market.”

Prithviraj Guha, who teaches economics at Calcutta’s Presidency University, is more philosophical. He says, “When people follow others blindly, we call it herd mentality. It’s not that the lower economic class is making a good income out of reels, but they are hopeful. This is also why the largest numbers of lottery ticket buyers belong to this demographic.”