Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/MUMBAI: Panchayat, a comedy-drama centered around the life and adventures of a city-bred young man in a remote village, has become the most-liked Hindi web show of last year in India.
According to CNN, the Panchayat’s second season was also listed as the third most watched after season three of Aashram Rudra: The Edge of Darkness.
More than 30 million people have watched the second season of Panchayat, and the show has an IMDB rating of 8.9 out of 10, higher than House of the Dragon or Stranger Things season four.
The storyline of ‘Panchayat’ is straightforward
The storyline is straightforward. An engineering graduate, Abhishek Tripathi, played by Jitendra Kumar, opts for a low-level bureaucrat job in a small village, ‘Phulera,’ in Uttar Pradesh.
His new residence is a squat structure with three rooms that house the Panchayat’s office, which is dusty and dismal, and his job pays poorly (village council). His colleagues need to be more educated, more educated country folks.
Tripathi spends his days trying to resolve the mundane problems of the local people with guidance and help from the council members, and his nights spent in power outages and his lonely existence and occasionally escaping from deadly snakes.
Desperately seeking an escape, he starts studying late at night to prepare for an exam that can brighten his job prospects and get him out of Phulera.
But as days, weeks, and months go by, Tripathi becomes less crotchety – friendships are formed, and there’s even the possibility of romance.
Panchayat, aired on Amazon Prime, gives viewers who live mainly in cities and are unaware of rural India a glimpse into village life in a nation with a clear rural-urban divide.
The audience has connected with the humorous and endearing tale of the young bureaucrat and his unassuming coworkers.
Author and film critic Bal Chatterjee claims that “everyone got captivated by the show because it is so relatable, so true.” He calls Panchayat a “middle-of-the-road” program that offers straightforward tales of ordinary people. He claims that although they were popular in the 1980s and 1990s, family drama and action took their place.
The creator of Panchayat, Chandan Kumar, says he sought to create a program that would give viewers a glimpse of rural life, but “the intention was not to make it preachy.”
“We wanted to make it enjoyable. People watch shows for enjoyment, so he says it had to be amusing, “but it’s tough to run away from serious subjects.”
