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

Rimjhim Won India’s Most Popular TV Serial With 60% of the Vote. Star Plus’s Five Shows Got 7% Between Them.

By Karan Dutta

Updated on November 3, 2026
IST 10:23 am

A Dangal TV daily took 60.4% of 22,477 verified votes. The age and gender data show exactly who put it there.

One show beat the other sixteen combined

Seventeen shows were on the ballot for Most Popular TV Serial at IFTA 2026. One of them took more votes than the other sixteen combined.

Rimjhim – Choti Umar Bada Safar, a Dangal TV daily, won with 13,576 of 22,477 verified votes — 60.4%. The runner-up, Colors’ Tu Juliet Jatt Di, got 12.1%. The winner’s share was five times the runner-up’s.

Add up the votes by channel and the result gets sharper:

Dangal TV (2 shows): 15,240 votes — 67.8%
Colors (5 shows): 4,221 votes — 18.8%
Star Plus (5 shows): 1,639 votes — 7.3%
Zee TV (4 shows): 991 votes — 4.4%
Sony SAB (1 show): 386 votes — 1.7%

Dangal TV’s two shows — Rimjhim and Pati Brahmachari (3rd, 7.4%) — took more than two-thirds of the vote. Star Plus had five shows on the ballot, including Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai (4th) and Anupamaa (14th, 94 votes). Together they drew fewer votes (1,639) than Pati Brahmachari did on its own (1,664).

IFTA 2026 Most Popular TV Serial winner: Rimjhim – Choti Umar Bada Safar, 60.4% of 22,477 verified votes

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 19,060 of the 22,477 votes, nearly 85%. Rimjhim won 61.8% of them.
Voters under 25 cast 78% of all votes (17,522).
Girls aged 12–17 were its strongest group: 75.5% of their 5,389 votes went to Rimjhim.
Women under 25 alone gave it about 10,300 votes, roughly three of every four votes it received.

Here is the surprise. Among women, Rimjhim’s share falls steadily with age, from 75.5% of teenage girls to 31.3% of women over 60. Among men it does the opposite after 35: it rises to 58.3% of men aged 35–44 and 63.5% of men aged 45–59.

Same winner, different second choices

Rimjhim won with women (61.8%) and with men (51.9%), and it led every single age group for both. Below the winner, women and men voted very differently:

Comedy was a male pick. Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah got 4.9% of men’s votes but only 1.2% of women’s, about four times more popular with men.
Men also leaned to Udne Ki Aasha (3.8 times more), Naagin 7 (2.3 times) and Dangal TV’s Pati Brahmachari, men’s clear second choice at 11.9%.
Women leaned to Seher Hone Ko Hai (2.2 times more), Mannat (1.7 times) and Tu Juliet Jatt Di, women’s second choice at 12.5%.
Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai was the one big show that women and men rated about the same.

Not just one award

The vote for the show carried through to its cast. Rimjhim won six of the nine Television categories at IFTA 2026: TV Serial (60.4%), Actor in a Lead Role (Himanshu Awasthi, 54.6%), Actress in a Lead Role (Yashika Sharma, 59.9%), TV Jodi (58.9%), Actor in a Supporting Role (Atul Verma, 56.5%) and Actress in a Supporting Role (Kanchan Dubey, 26.2%). The other three went to Naagin 7 (Kanika Mann, negative role), Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah (Dilip Joshi, comic role) and Laughter Chefs S3 (reality show).

Rimjhim – Choti Umar Bada Safar began on Dangal TV in October 2025. Set in a royal family in Jaipur, it follows Rimjhim, who devotes herself to protecting her younger brother from powerful relatives.

In the voters’ own words

Voters could add a reason with their vote. Many of the reasons were short and simple:

“Their acting in this role felt so real and natural.”
“The storyline is very unique and not like saas bahu drama.”
“Best serial ever.”

This is not a ratings chart or a critics’ list. It measures which audience turned up to vote, and how hard. Rimjhim’s fans, most of them young women, turned up in numbers no other fandom matched.

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 TV Serial result, or all results: Bollywood · OTT · Television

All vote figures from the IFTA 2026 Most Popular TV Serial results on PolBol (22,477 verified votes, results final). Group figures are as published there; “about 10,300” is calculated from the published shares. Show background: ThePrint (29 January 2026) and TVmaze.