Indian True-Crime Documentaries Worth Watching, and Where They Stream

Four episodes on four businessmen: Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, Subrata Roy of Sahara and Ramalinga Raju of Satyam. Netflix had to push the release back after court challenges, and the first three episodes came out in October 2020. The Satyam episode stayed under a Hyderabad court injunction until the court vacated it, and it finally streamed on 31 December 2025. It is the one financial-crime title on this list.

An observational series that follows Bengaluru city police through four investigations from early 2020, three murders and the kidnapping of a one-year-old. There is no dramatised reconstruction; the cameras sit in the police stations. Directed by N. Amit and Jack Rampling, it is closer to a fly-on-the-wall procedural than a mystery.

On 1 July 2018, eleven members of one family were found dead in their house in Burari, Delhi. Leena Yadav and Anubhav Chopra's three-part series is less interested in who than in why, working through the family's diaries, the neighbours and the police investigation. It is the series that showed Netflix there was an Indian audience for this genre.

The first Indian Predator series, directed by Ayesha Sood, is about Chandrakant Jha, who in 2006 and 2007 left decapitated bodies outside Tihar Jail with notes taunting the Delhi Police. It uses dramatised reconstruction alongside interviews with investigators and journalists. Netflix followed it with The Diary of a Serial Killer and Murder in a Courtroom in the same year.

The third Indian Predator series reverses the usual setup. Its subject is Akku Yadav, accused of years of violence against the residents of Kasturba Nagar in Nagpur, and the crowd of women from the neighbourhood who killed him inside a Nagpur district courtroom in 2004. It asks what happens when a community stops believing the law will protect it.

Prime Video's series, produced by India Today Originals and directed by Patrick Graham, who also made Netflix's Ghoul, is about Shakereh Khaleeli. She disappeared from her Bangalore home in 1991, and her remains were found three years later buried under the courtyard. Her second husband, Swami Shraddananda, was convicted; his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the Supreme Court in 2008.

A feature-length Netflix documentary from Minnow Films, directed by Raaghav Dar and Francis Longhurst, about the Mumbai Police's war with Dawood Ibrahim's D-Company in the 1990s and the encounter squads it produced. Former officers including Pradeep Sharma and Ravindra Angre speak on camera, and the film is at its most interesting when it lets them justify themselves.

Selvamani Selvaraj's four-part series on the sandalwood smuggler and poacher who evaded the police of two states for decades in the forests along the Tamil Nadu–Karnataka border. It is built on interviews with people from both sides of the manhunt. Reviewers praised its balance and also argued it comes close to sympathising with its subject, which is a fair summary of the debate around it.

Christo Tomy's feature-length film is about Koodathayi, a village in Kerala's Kozhikode district, where six members of one family died between 2002 and 2016. Jolly Joseph, a member of the family by marriage, is accused of poisoning them with cyanide; her trial had not concluded when the film was released. The film leans on the testimony of the surviving relatives who first raised the alarm.

Uraaz Bahl and Shaana Levy's series on the 2012 disappearance of Sheena Bora, for whose murder her mother Indrani Mukerjea was arrested in 2015. The CBI went to the Bombay High Court to stop it during the trial, which delayed the release by a week. It features Indrani Mukerjea herself and her children, Vidhie and Mikhail, and critics noted that it gives the accused's account a lot of room.