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 said 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. I had few followers,” added the 27-year-old MBA dropout who runs Hindi-language stock education channel FinnovationZ.