With the Central government imposing a ban on 59 Chinese apps including the popular entertainment platform Tik Tok on June 29, artists across Jharkhand claim that talent is not based on a particular app.

Showing support to the government’s decision, the users of apps like Tik Tok and Vigo Video are worried about what happens to their content on the various social media platforms and hope that some similar Indian apps will soon be made for them to showcase their talent.

Dhanbad based Dharam Kumar and Vikas Kumar had about 1.43 lakh followers on Tik Tok and close to four lakh on Vigo Video. “We had been posting funny videos on Tik Tok for about six months and on the other one for almost two years now. Our videos were mostly on the native language of Jharkhand. This is a very good decision taken by the government to ban Chinese apps. We will now post our videos on YouTube and hopefully a new Indian app will also be made soon.”

“The biggest drawback of this is that we have lost all our followers and will now have to start afresh. Another major problem is that since the ban was imposed, we do not have any access to our pages so we can neither remove our content from there nor deactivate our accounts,” added Dharam.

Dubbing artists Akram Ali and Mohammad Asfaqulla from Ranchi had a page on Tik Tok by the name of DesiVoice99 and had recently started posting videos on the app. “We were fairly new to Tik Tok and in just about two weeks time our fan following had gone up to 10,000. Prior to the lockdown we had posted around 50 videos. A lot of people generally post their videos using our voice over.  The decision to ban the app is in absolute favour of the country. And if we have the talent then we will surely find another way to showcase it very soon,” said Akram Ali.

The dubbing artists also have a YouTube channel by the name of DesiVoice with 84,000 followers. “With the advertisements shown during our videos, I manage to earn some extra pocket money as well. So after the Chinese apps, I and my teammates have decided to share our videos on YouTube only. Initially we were just making these videos for dun but on sharing them with friends, when they found it funny we were encouraged to make more of them,” added Akram.