By Nupur Acharya, Ronojoy Mazumdar and Ishika Mookerjee
In November, when India was in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, one of the country’s top YouTube financial “influencers” was met with an unusually large barrage of requests on his trip home.
“My friends kept asking me how they could invest in mutual funds or equities even a driver of an auto rickshaw asked me how he could set up a mutual fund with 500 rupees ($7) a month,” Prasad Lendwe told Bloomberg News of his trip from Hyderabad to Malkapur, a 300,000-strong city 480 kilometers northeast of Mumbai.
“When I started my YouTube platform, no one was interested in stock investing and I had few followers,” added the 27-year-old MBA dropout who runs Hindi-language stock education channel FinnovationZ.