The least interesting way to describe Tulsi is as a village full of YouTubers. That phrasing invites the usual television treatment: a grandmother performs for a smartphone, somebody points at subscriber numbers, and urban viewers are permitted three minutes of astonishment that people outside a metro understand cameras.
What interests me about Tulsi, near Raipur in Chhattisgarh, is not technological novelty. Smartphones have been ordinary village objects for years. The remarkable part is social: residents have turned video production into a shared local practice. People act in one another’s sketches, lend locations, learn editing and move between roles. In an online economy obsessed with the solitary genius of the “creator”, Tulsi looks more like a repertory theatre with mobile data.
The village did not begin with an influencer fantasy
Accounts of Tulsi’s transformation trace it to Jai Prakash Verma and Gyanendra Shukla, who started making Chhattisgarhi videos and developed the channel Being Chhattisgarhiya. Other residents joined productions and then created channels of their own. The Indian Express account of the village describes a mature ecosystem rather than a lucky viral clip: writers, actors, technicians and residents learning from one another.
That distinction matters. Viral fame is an event; a local skill base is infrastructure. One person can accidentally collect a million views and still leave nothing behind. A community that knows how to frame a shot, record usable sound, write a comic scene and edit on limited equipment possesses knowledge that can migrate into weddings, advertising, local cinema, education or work in Raipur.
Tulsi also had a cultural runway. Reporting has noted the village’s tradition of performance, including Ramleela. I like that continuity because it punctures the lazy claim that platforms bestowed creativity on passive users. YouTube supplied distribution and a possible income stream. The appetite to perform, watch neighbours perform and turn familiar life into drama was already present.
A public studio is a more radical idea than it sounds
When local authorities and the gram panchayat supported a dedicated production facility, Hamar Flix, they made an unusually intelligent public investment. The facility cost ₹25 lakh, according to reporting including a later Hindustan Times visit to Tulsi. Governments routinely fund physical stages, auditoriums and sports grounds. A studio serving local digital workers belongs to the same family, even if ring lights make administrators nervous.
Shared equipment lowers the cost of failure. That is crucial because most videos will not become hits and many channels will never provide a full salary. The mythology of the creator economy hides this base rate. It shows us the person who escaped a conventional job, not the thousands purchasing microphones for audiences that never arrive. Tulsi’s collaborative model distributes equipment, labour and learning; it does not eliminate risk, but it makes experimentation less financially foolish.
I would still resist converting the village into a government slogan. “YouTube Village” is a charming label until every visiting official demands a performance and every young resident is treated as a future influencer. Tulsi contains farmers, teachers, students, older people and workers with ambitions that need not fit a thumbnail. A place should be allowed to have an unusual specialism without becoming a theme park devoted to it.
There are harder questions too. Platform income can change without warning. Recommendation systems reward repetition, provocation and relentless output. Copyright claims can erase revenue. Family-friendly comedy may attract viewers today and disappear from their feeds tomorrow. A village that collectively learned production should therefore guard against collectively depending on one American platform.
The useful export is cooperation, not imitation
I do not think every panchayat should now build a studio and instruct residents to become content creators. That is how a living local phenomenon gets flattened into a scheme with an acronym. A studio without an existing community of practice becomes another locked room inaugurated with a ribbon. Tulsi’s facility followed years of voluntary work; it did not manufacture that work from a tender document.
What other places can copy is the logic. Find the activity people already pursue—music, weaving, repair, food, theatre, agricultural instruction—and invest in the bottleneck they cannot solve individually. It might be recording equipment, a workshop, storage, broadband or a shared sales operation. The public contribution should strengthen a real network rather than stage a photo opportunity.
I am also taken by the way collaborative production makes room for people who do not want to be stars. Online culture tells us visibility is the prize, but every watchable video needs someone checking sound, holding a reflector, finding a costume, remembering continuity or feeding the cast. Tulsi’s story gives those supporting roles a place in the local economy. That is more humane than insisting everyone turn a personality into a brand.
The internet usually extracts stories from villages: a strange incident is filmed, stripped of context and circulated for distant amusement. Tulsi has reversed that direction. Residents choose the stories, perform them in their own language and participate in making the image that travels. The result may sometimes be rough, sentimental or algorithmically familiar. It is still authorship.
So I am not impressed merely because a village can use YouTube. I am impressed because Tulsi has made an individualistic medium behave, however imperfectly, like a cooperative. The cameras will change, platforms may decline and subscriber counts will wobble. The habit of making things together is the part worth preserving.