Explained: How India's making TikTok alternatives for users in Bharat

The lockdown has also added to the traction that video and audio apps such as Chingari, Roposo, Khabri and Trell are seeing as people are looking at options to earn incentives from home

The year was 2017. India had not experienced TikTok yet but Shanghai-headquartered Musical.ly was gaining popularity in the country. Two friends from tier-II cities of Bhilai and Cuttack, Sumit Ghosh and Biswatma Nayak, who were working at IT consulting company Globussoft, got inspired by the video sharing app and started building something similar for India's smaller cities.
 

During the same time, ByteDance bought Musical.ly and merged it with its mega app TikTok. It started spending millions of dollars, cannibalising the India small video content market. However, Ghosh and Nayak did not lose faith in their application and Chingari was born