Tanya Mittal

Timeline

1. 2000Born in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, according to biography profiles that give 27 September 2000.She has not confirmed a date of birth publicly, and a 2018 pageant report described her as 22, which does not fit that year.
2. ChildhoodBorn with a cleft lip and palate and underwent a series of reconstructive surgeries.
3. 2010sSchooling at Vidya Public School in Gwalior, then enrolment in an architecture course at Chandigarh University.
4. 2018Crowned Miss Tourism India and then Miss Asia Tourism Universe in Lebanon, competing against 31 contestants.
5. 2018Already described by Femina as the owner of Handmade Love, the personalised gifting brand she built through social media.
6. 2018 to 2025Works the pageant circuit into a speaking career, with college talks, conference appearances and reported TEDx invitations.
7. 2025Enters Bigg Boss 19 on the premiere night of 24 August as one of sixteen housemates.
8. 2025Survives 105 days in the house and finishes as third runner-up at the grand finale on 7 December.

Who Tanya Mittal is

Tanya Mittal is an entrepreneur from Gwalior who built a personalised gifting business on Instagram before she was out of her teens, and who has spent the years since converting that business into a wider public career. Her brand, Handmade Love, sells customised and handcrafted gifts. Her pageant record, a national title in 2018 followed by an international one in Lebanon the same year, gave her the platform she now uses for speaking engagements and, from August 2025, for television.^[1][2]

The three parts of her public life are usually reported separately. In practice they feed each other. The pageant gave her a stage and a vocabulary for talking about confidence. The business gave her something concrete to talk about on that stage, which is a rarer asset among pageant winners than it sounds. Bigg Boss 19 then gave her the largest audience of the three, and she held it for the full fifteen weeks of the season, which no other first time contestant from the premiere night managed to do as quietly.^[1][3]

What she is not is a film actor or a television professional. She came to a reality show with no scripted credits, no comic timing built on sets and no fan base inherited from a serial. The audience that voted her to the last week of Bigg Boss 19 was responding to a business owner from a tier two city who talked about her own surgeries on national television, and that is the fact most of the coverage of her run circled back to.^[2][3]

Gwalior, the cleft condition and the surgeries

Tanya Mittal was born with a cleft lip and palate, a condition in which the tissue of the upper lip and the roof of the mouth does not close fully during pregnancy. It is one of the most common birth differences in India and one of the most treatable, but treatment is surgical, staged over years, and expensive enough that many families never complete it. She has spoken publicly about going through several operations as a child and about the bullying that came with visible scarring in a school in a city where nobody else in her class looked like her.^[1][2]

That experience is the spine of her public speaking. The talks she gives at colleges and youth forums are not generic motivational sessions about believing in yourself. They are accounts of a specific medical history, of what it costs a child to sit through repeated surgery and then walk back into a classroom, and of the decision to be photographed for a living after years of avoiding cameras. It is a narrative that works precisely because the evidence is on her face and she does not pretend otherwise.^[1]

She is associated with awareness work around cleft conditions and with youth and women focused initiatives, including reported ties to organisations such as Girl Up and Pink Legal. Those associations are worth stating carefully. They appear in profile coverage and in her own public material, but no NGO has published a formal statement confirming a role, and the details of what the work involved are thin.^[1]

Gwalior matters to the story in a way that is easy to skip past. It is a city of about a million people with a strong trading and coaching economy and almost no entertainment industry of its own. A young woman building a gifting brand there, rather than in Mumbai or Delhi, had to reach customers through a phone rather than through a shopfront on a high street, which is why the business grew up on Instagram and why she talks about social media the way a shopkeeper talks about footfall.^[1][2]

School, architecture and the pageant detour

She completed her schooling at Vidya Public School in Gwalior and then enrolled in an architecture course at Chandigarh University. Architecture is an unusual choice for someone who ends up running a gifting company, and it is the detail that explains the rest of her presentation. The course trains a student to think in plans, materials and finished objects, and the product line she later built is essentially that training applied at a much smaller scale.^[1]

Whether she finished the degree is where the sources part company. Biography profiles say she left the course to run the business full time. A Femina report published in October 2018, when she won her international title, described her as a graduate of Chandigarh University. Both statements can be true if she completed the degree later, and neither outlet has set out a date for the convocation or an exit year, so this entry does not claim one.^[1][2]

The Chandigarh connection is also where the pageant story starts. University campuses in Punjab and Haryana supply a large share of the contestants on the Indian beauty pageant circuit, and a student with a business of her own was an easy sell to a jury looking for something other than a modelling portfolio. Her first title, Miss Tourism India 2018, put her into the international round in Lebanon later the same year.^[2]

Miss Asia Tourism Universe 2018

In October 2018, Tanya Mittal was crowned Miss Asia Tourism Universe at a pageant held in Lebanon, representing India against 31 other contestants. She went through four rounds before the title was announced. Femina, reporting the win, noted that the jury scored her interview round at 100 out of 100 and that she was crowned by Tony Medawar, a vice president of the Miss Tourism organisation, in the national costume segment.^[2]

The tourism pageant circuit sits a level below the Miss India and Miss World route in Indian public attention, and its winners rarely become household names. What the title gave her was legitimacy on a stage, a first taste of international travel as a representative rather than a tourist, and a line in every subsequent profile. It also gave her the confidence to speak in public as an authority rather than a contestant, which is the part that lasted.^[1][2]

The win came with a set of claims that have travelled with her since. Femina's report described her, at the time, as an associate director of Bliss Foundation, a YouTuber, a poet and an author, and as someone who had mastered more than 55 crafts. Those are her own descriptions of her range, reported without independent verification, and they are repeated here as claims rather than as findings.^[2]

The 2018 coverage is also the reason her age is uncertain. The report described her as 22 years old. The date of birth that circulates on biography sites, 27 September 2000, would have made her 18 at the time of the pageant. Both cannot be right, and no interview in which she settles the question has been published.^[1][2]

Handmade Love and the business she built

Handmade Love is a personalised gifting venture built around customised, handcrafted products: hampers, keepsakes, photo based gifts and the kind of item bought for a birthday or an anniversary rather than for a household. She started it as a teenager, and the accounts that describe the beginning put the initial budget at around 500 rupees, which is less a business plan than a test of whether anyone would pay for the first order.^[1]

The growth story that follows is a recognisable Indian small business pattern from the last decade. No advertising budget, no retail presence, no distributor. Instead, a phone, a steady posting routine, packaging that photographs well, and festival seasons that arrive four times a year with a predictable spike in demand. Profile coverage attributes the brand's traction to community marketing, features by other creators and Diwali and Raksha Bandhan product lines.^[1]

The numbers attached to the brand are the part to treat with care. Public claims say Handmade Love has served more than 200,000 customers and employs a team of over 300 people. No audited figure, company filing or independent report supports either number, and a company of that size would normally leave a trail in trade registries. This entry records them as claims made in her publicity material and repeated by outlets that profile her, not as verified scale.^[1]

What is not in doubt is that the business exists, sells, and predates her television appearance by at least seven years. Femina mentioned Handmade Love in October 2018, when she was a pageant contestant with no other claim to press attention, which is a firmer anchor for the founding date than any of the later profiles.^[2]

The brand has also brought the only sustained criticism in her record. Online complaints about product quality and delivery delays, and questions about how much of the customer count is inflated by repeat and bulk festival orders, circulate on review pages and social media. She has not responded to them in an interview, and no consumer forum order involving the company appears in the public record. They remain complaints, unproven and unanswered.^[1]

Speaking, poetry and the author question

Since the pageant, most of her public work has been on stage rather than in a shop. She speaks at colleges, conferences and youth forums, usually on confidence, self acceptance and building a business without capital. She has also been reported as a TEDx speaker at more than one event in India, a credit that carries weight in exactly the rooms where she performs.^[1]

The poetry and authorship are harder to pin down. Profiles describe her as a poet and an author, and she does publish motivational writing and reflective pieces on social media. No published book with an ISBN, a publisher and a date has been identified for this entry, and none of the profiles that call her an author names a title. Social media writing and a book are different things, and the sources use the words interchangeably.^[1]

This is a common inflation in Indian profile writing, where a public figure's own description of herself is passed through several aggregator sites until it reads like a verified list of achievements. It does not make her less of a speaker. It does mean that anyone checking her record should treat the awards and titles listed on biography sites, including several she is credited with holding, as unconfirmed until an award body or a dated news report is produced.^[1]

Bigg Boss 19

Bigg Boss 19 premiered on 24 August 2025 on Colors TV and streamed on JioHotstar, with Salman Khan hosting for the sixteenth consecutive season. The season's theme was Gharwalon Ki Sarkaar, a parliament style format in which the housemates formed a government and settled questions in an assembly room, and it opened with sixteen contestants. Tanya Mittal was one of them, entering on premiere night alongside Gaurav Khanna, Ashnoor Kaur, Amaal Mallik, Zeishan Quadri, Nagma Mirajkar and the rest of the original cast.^[3]

She was nominated for eviction in the first week, on Day 2, when the housemates picked Abhishek Bajaj, Gaurav Khanna, Natalia Janoszek, Neelam Giri, Pranit More, Tanya and Zeishan Quadri for the weekend process. Being nominated early is not unusual for a contestant without an existing television fan base, and it set the pattern of her season: she was rarely the loudest person in the room and was repeatedly put up for a vote anyway.^[3]

Her first substantial role in the house was administrative rather than dramatic. On Day 5, in the season's first captaincy task, she was appointed sanchalak, the person who adjudicates the contest between Abhishek, Ashnoor and Kunickaa. She declared Kunickaa Sadanand the winner after counting the coloured tiles, which made Kunickaa the first captain of the season. It was a small job, it was done without dispute, and it established her in the house as someone the makers could hand a rulebook to.^[3]

Over the following weeks she stayed out of the season's biggest fights. The house in that period was organised around Pranit More's roasts, Zeishan Quadri's temper, the Awez Darbar and Nagma Mirajkar couple and Kunickaa Sadanand's authority as captain, and a contestant who did not want a piece of any of that could survive by being useful in tasks and pleasant in the kitchen. That is roughly what she did, and it carried her past stronger personalities who left earlier.^[3]

By the last week of November she was one of the five finalists, along with Gaurav Khanna, Farrhana Bhatt, Pranit More and Amaal Mallik. The finale aired on 7 December 2025, on Day 105. Gaurav Khanna won the trophy and the prize money, Farrhana Bhatt was first runner-up, Pranit More second runner-up, Tanya Mittal third runner-up and Amaal Mallik fourth runner-up, which put her fourth in the season's order of finish.^[3][4][5]

Fourth place out of sixteen, in a season that became one of the most watched in the show's history, is a better result than the coverage of the finale suggested. She was the only contestant from the original sixteen without a prior television or film credit to reach the last night, and she did it without a single eviction scare in the final month.^[4][5]

Fees, earnings and what the numbers mean

Koimoi reported during the season that Tanya Mittal was paid about 64,200 rupees per day for Bigg Boss 19, a figure that works out to roughly 67 lakh rupees across 105 days. Reality show fees in India are usually quoted as per day or per week rates, negotiated before the season, and they vary by a factor of ten between a film actor and a first time contestant. A rate in the sixty thousands a day puts her in the middle of that range, above the creators and below the established television faces.^[6]

The makers do not publish contracts and the figures come from production side sources quoted by entertainment desks, so the number should be read as a reported estimate rather than a confirmed payment. The same applies to the net worth figures attached to her, which biography sites put at around two crore rupees. There is no disclosure behind that estimate, and a private company's revenue does not become public unless it files accounts.^[1][6]

What the fee report does establish is that she was treated as a paid contestant rather than a guest or a wildcard, from premiere night to the finale. In a season where several better known names came in late, that is a statement about how the makers valued her.^[6]

What has not been confirmed

Her date of birth is unresolved. Biography profiles give 27 September 2000. Femina, reporting her pageant win in October 2018, described her as 22 years old. If the 2018 report is right, the 2000 date cannot be. She has not published a date of birth herself and no interview settles the question, so the age that appears on most websites is a database entry rather than a confirmed fact.^[1][2]

Her education is similarly open. She is consistently described as an architecture student at Chandigarh University, but the accounts differ on whether she graduated or left to run her business, and no year is attached to either version.^[1][2]

The scale of Handmade Love is a claim, not a record. The 200,000 customer figure and the 300 employee figure come from her own publicity and are repeated by profile sites without audit. The founding budget of about 500 rupees is the same kind of number.^[1]

The authorship is unverified. She is described as a poet and an author, and she does write publicly, but no book title, publisher or publication date has been located, and the profiles that call her an author do not name one.^[1]

The awards list needs the same treatment. Titles including a Youngest Woman Achiever Award, a Nari Shakti Award, an Asian Excellence Award, an Amity Corporate Excellence Award and an Outstanding Young Person of Gwalior honour are attributed to her in profile coverage, some with named presenters. No award body announcement, certificate or dated report confirming any of them has been found, and this entry does not assert that she holds them.^[1]

Her height and weight are published on biography sites with specific numbers and are not confirmed by her. They are left out of the infobox here rather than repeated. Her relationship status is also unconfirmed: the profiles that cover her describe her as unmarried and living with her parents in Gwalior, and she has not discussed a partner in any interview that this entry could find.^[1]