The rise of the Indian OTT entertainment space has led to a deluge of compelling shows — all Made In India. Initially, it was all about dark, gritty shows on Indian OTT platforms. Serial killer dramas, crime capers and gang-war sagas ruled the roost. But for how long could viewers watch and appreciate the same kind of content? And that too, when every OTT platform was solely engaged in making clones of the tried and tested successful show formula.
All that changed with the stunning success of Scam 1992 on SonyLIV. The show is based on the shady stock market scam of the early nineties, the one that was perpetrated by the infamous Harshad Mehta. Directed by National award winning director Hansal Mehta, Scam 1992 has won rave reviews and tonnes of appreciation from viewers. And just like that, content creators have got a new genre to mine — the genre of scams, their discovery by whistle-blowers and ultimately, their outcome.
Already, Ullu App is in the process of releasing a web series ‘Paper‘, based on one of the most notorious scams that rocked the country – the ‘stamp paper scam’ of the late nineties. Abdul Karim Telgi was the mastermind of that one. Netflix’s Bad Boy Billionaires is another show that touches upon four of the most devastating financial scams the country has seen – Subrata Roy’s Sahara scam, Nirav Modi’s PNB scam, Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines scam, and Ramalinga Raju’s Satyam Computers scam.
Bad Boy Billionaires just skims over the surface of the scams it touches upon. Each of the four scams is perfect raw material to construct a compelling series out of it, when in the hands of the right director, creator and OTT platform. Besides these four, there are numerous other scams in India that will make gripping web series.
The Coal scam, the 2G Spectrum scam, the Commonwealth Games scam, the Hawala scam of 1990, the Abhishek Verma arms deals scandal, and many more, are ideal web series material. In fact, Indian content creators are sitting on a goldmine of web series material in the form of the scores of scams that have rocked India and Indians. One only has to look, and there’s tons of scams just waiting to be mined for the sake of web series.
Let’s see which streaming platform makes the first move in picking a hot, mysterious, and intriguing scam to make a web series on. One that will beat Scam 1992 in the popularity stakes and the quality of filmmaking on display in the above.
Below is a list of top scams in India in no particular order:
1. Coalgate Scam
2. Vijay Mallya and Kingfisher Airlines scam
3. 2G Spectrum scam
4. Commonwealth Games scam
5. BOFORS scam
6. Nirav Modi PNB Bank fraud
7. AgustaWestland chopper scam
8. Satyam scam
9. Hawala scam
10. Wakf Board Land Scam
11. The Fodder Scam
12. Stamp Paper Scam
and the list goes on and on…!!