India Newspapers

Mass media in India is that part of the Indian media that aims to reach a wide audience. Besides the news media, radio, television, and the internet are playing an increasing role.

Compared with many other developing countries, the Indian press is relatively unfettered, except for obstacles in the way of setting up media companies, which were part of the pre-1990 license raj. In 2001, India had 45,974 newspapers, including 5364 daily newspapers published in over 100 languages.

The largest number of newspapers were published in Hindi (20,589), followed by English (7,596), Marathi (2,943), Urdu (2,906), Bengali (2,741), Gujarati (2,215), Tamil (2,119), Kannada (1,816), Malayalam(1,505) and Telugu (1,289). The Hindi daily press has a circulation of over 23 million copies, followed by English with over 8 million copies.

There are several major publishing groups in India, the most prominent among them being the Times of India Group, the Indian Express Group, the Hindustan Times Group, The Hindu group, the Anandabazar Patrika Group, the Eenadu Group, the Malayala Manorama Group,the Mathrubhumi group, the Sahara group, the Bhaskar group, and the Dainik Jagran group.

India has more than forty domestic news agencies. The Express News Service, the Press Trust of India, and the United News of India are among the major news agencies.

In India, The Times of India is the largest English newspaper in circulation, with 2.14 million copies daily. According to the 2006 National Readership Study, the Dainik Jagran is the most-read, local-language (Hindi) newspaper, with 21.2 million readers.