IFTA 2026, India’s only people’s choice film and television awards — voting open

Women gave the JioHotstar series 31.7% of their votes. Men gave it 10.7% and backed The Ba***ds of Bollywood instead.

Fifteen series, one clear winner

Fifteen series were on the ballot for Most Popular Web Series at IFTA 2026.

Chiraiya (JioHotstar) won with 503 of 1,813 verified votes, 27.7%. The runner-up, The Legend of Hanuman Season 6 (JioHotstar), got 12.1%. The winner’s share was 2.3 times the runner-up’s.

JioHotstar had four series on the ballot, and together they took 48.2% of all votes. Netflix had six, which shared 26.7%.

Chiraiya, winner of Most Popular Web Series at IFTA 2026

Who decided it

Every IFTA vote is OTP-verified, one per WhatsApp number per category, and every voter’s age and gender is recorded at sign-up. So this is not a survey sample. It is the full count of who voted.

Women cast 1,468 of the 1,813 votes (81%). Chiraiya won 31.7% of women’s votes and 10.7% of men’s.
Voters under 25 cast 77% of all votes. The biggest single group was voters aged 18–24 (997 votes).
Women aged 18–24 were Chiraiya’s strongest group: 34.9% of their 809 votes went to Chiraiya.
78% of Chiraiya’s votes came from women under 25 (395 of 503).

Chiraiya led in every age group with at least 30 voters.

With 1,813 votes, this is one of the smaller IFTA 2026 categories, so read the smaller groups (such as voters over 45) with care.

Women and men picked different winners

Women cast 81% of the votes in this category, so their choice decided it. Among men alone, The Ba***ds of Bollywood (18.1%) and Panchayat Season 4 (15.4%) both finished ahead of Chiraiya.

The Family Man Season 3: 3.9% of women’s votes, 7.7% of men’s, about twice as popular with men.

Across IFTA 2026

Chiraiya won twice at IFTA 2026. Divya Dutta also won Most Popular OTT Actress in a Lead Role for the series, with 28.7% of the vote.

In the voters’ own words

Voters could add a reason with their vote. A few of them:

“Watching this is too muchhh fun 👍🏻🤌🏻”
“Bahut acchi series hai”
“Best series”

This is not a ratings chart or a critics’ list. It measures which audience turned up to vote, and how hard.

See the full results

IFTA 2026 voting has closed and the results are in. No jury, no award fixing: every winner was decided by India’s votes. See the full Most Popular Web Series result, or all results: Bollywood · OTT · Television

All vote figures from the IFTA 2026 Most Popular Web Series results on PolBol (1,813 verified votes, results final). Group figures are as published there; combined totals are added up from the published counts. Nominee images: IFTA 2026.