For many, the growth of the OTT space has brought along a sense of equality in terms of the opportunity and visibility, but what remains to be seen is whether it has also rectified the skewed pay gap or not. However, actor Rasika Dugal says finding an answer to that isn’t that simple.

“I always find it hard answering whether OTTs have ushered in pay equality. I’ve heard that there’s a disparity, but I have no idea what people around me are being paid,” Dugal tells us. The 36-year-old elaborates, “Every project is priced differently. I might know how much a few friends of mine charge but their projects are set up differently than the ones I might be doing. So, it’s very hard to compare.”

Apart from the different nature of projects and their pays, and lack of transparency, the issue is also veiled by discrimination. “You never know whether you’re being discriminated against. You can never pinpoint if you’re getting paid less because you’re a woman, or if you’re facing pay disparity because of gender. The difficult thing about discrimination is that it’s so subtle,” says the actor.

Over the years, Dugal has proved her mettle with outstanding performances on the web space, be it as the idealistic young cop in Delhi Crime or the feisty Bina Tripathi in Mirzapur.

However, gaining recognition does not always make it easier to quote the fee one deserves, feels the actor. “It’s hard to put a price on what I do. You’re investing yourself wholeheartedly in something. Being paid is a part of what I expect to receive out of the work. There are so many other things involved, like what it takes out of me or what it teaches me,” she adds. And she asserts that it’s one of the most “hard yet beautiful things about the industry”.

Starting her career with films such as Tahaan (2008) and Murder 2 (2011), Dugal has certainly come a long way, and she admits she couldn’t have asked to be an actor at a better time, thanks to the boom of the digital content space.

Recalling the time when she used to carry a DVD of her film, Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost (2015), in her purse and offer it to everyone she’d meet, she says “Earlier, distribution was a bottleneck. Aap apni picture bana toh lete the lekin marketing ka budget nahin hota tha. Then it’d never be able to compete with a bigger film for screens. OTT broke the bottleneck.”

The actor feels writers have scripted this change in the entertainment space, by writing more real characters for women. “A couple of years back, women characters were being written just as an act of tokenism. But now, the characters are very nuanced. They are actually celebrating femininity and not feeling the need to be masculine in any way. And it is very encouraging for an actor,” says the Manto (2018) actor, who has started working on her next projects, but is not allowed to divulge any further details about it.