General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Apharan

Apharan is an Indian Hindi-language crime thriller web series created and directed by Sidharth Sengupta, which premiered on the streaming platform ALTBalaji on 14 December 2018. Set in the hill stations of Uttarakhand, it follows senior police inspector Rudra Srivastava, who is drawn into a kidnapping-for-ransom plot that goes wrong and leaves him entangled in corruption, murder, and political conspiracy. A second season, Apharan 2: Sabka Katega, followed in March 2022 as a Voot Select original also streaming on Alt Balaji.

Key fact	Detail
Format	Hindi-language crime, drama, and thriller web series; two seasons totaling 23 episodes (12 in season 1, 11 in season 2)¹^•²
Season 1 release	14 December 2018 on ALTBalaji, with all 12 episodes streaming at launch; rated 18+¹
Season 2 release	18 March 2022, as a Voot Select original presented by Jio Studios, also streaming on Alt Balaji³^•⁴
Lead role	Arunoday Singh as Rudra Srivastava, a senior inspector in the Uttarakhand Police (a dual role in season 2 as Vikram Bahadur Shah)⁵
Main cast	Mahie Gill, Nidhi Singh, Varun Badola, Saanand Verma, Monica Chaudhary, Sanjay Batra, and Neha Kaul, among others¹
Episode titles	Every episode of the series is named after a Bollywood song from the 1980s⁶
Reception	About 8.2/10 on IMDb from roughly 21,000 votes; cited in a 2022 Balaji Telefilms filing as a top-rated ALTBalaji show at 8.4⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Premise

Season 1 centers on Rudra Srivastava, a celebrated but financially pressed senior inspector in the Uttarakhand Police who agrees to kidnap a young woman, Anusha Tyagi, at the request of a politician's wife, with the plan of extorting ransom money from her family. The scheme goes wrong: Anusha is murdered, Rudra is falsely accused, and he spends time in jail while trying to identify who killed her and why the kidnapping was arranged. The season frames his fight for survival through kidnapping, a mysterious murder, desperation for money, and betrayal in love, in what publicity materials described as a 1970s-style masala (Bollywood genre mixing action, romance, comedy, and melodrama together) thriller⁵^•⁹^•¹⁰.

The plot also forces Rudra to investigate his own crime as he becomes caught in a web of lies, a turn the show's promotion highlighted as its central hook¹¹. The series treats systemic corruption and political conspiracy as the backdrop to the kidnapping⁷.

Season 2

Apharan 2: Sabka Katega premiered on 18 March 2022 on Voot Select, with Alt Balaji also carrying the series, and was presented by Jio Studios³^•⁴. Rudra, now out of jail, is a suspended cop who takes on a high-stakes mission involving international crime when his wife's life becomes entangled with RAW intelligence operations, and part of the season plays out in Serbia rather than India⁵^•¹². Singh played a dual role in this season, as Rudra and as Vikram Bahadur Shah, and new characters included Nafisa, played by Sukhmani Sadana⁵^•⁶. The Times of India's review gave the season 3.5 out of 5, calling it a homage to Bollywood heroes, masala storytelling, and the era's nostalgic music, while noting it lacked the pace of a conventional comedy-thriller¹².

Production and style

Sidharth Sengupta directed and co-produced the series, with Mohinder Pratap Singh writing the screenplay and actor Varun Badola, who also appears in the cast, writing the dialogues. The producers were Siddharth Sengupta and Jyoti Sagar, and the series was developed by Ekta Kapoor under the Balaji Telefilms banner⁵^•⁹. Music was composed by Subham Sen Gupta, the director's son¹⁰.

The show's style mixes pulp crime with 1970s Hindi cinema conventions: retro music, one-liners, and a rugged lead character with a Bhojpuri accent modeled on the era's angry-young-hero image. Arunoday Singh said he worked to grasp the Hindi dialect for the part¹⁰. The episode titles carry the homage further, each one borrowed from a Bollywood song of the 1980s, including "Ek Haseena Thi, Ek Deewana Tha" and "Chahe Koi Mujhe Junglee Kahe"⁶^•⁷.

Reception and availability

The first season was one of ALTBalaji's most successful series, drawing praise for its narrative pace, twists, and background score¹¹. A 2022 Balaji Telefilms presentation listed Apharan among the platform's top-rated shows on IMDb at 8.4⁸; current aggregate listings put the IMDb score at about 8.2 with roughly 21,000 votes⁷. Season 1 was subsequently dubbed into Tamil and Kannada¹.

Streaming availability has shifted between platforms over the series' life: season 1 was an ALTBalaji original and later appeared on Voot and MX Player catalogs, and as of recent listings the series streams free with ads on MX Player, Amazon MX Player, and Amazon Prime Video Free with Ads⁷. No third season has been confirmed by its producers².

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Indian and South Asian web series › Premiered 2003 to 2020

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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