What is the universe of Hindi dailies?

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In recent years we saw the rapid expansion of the established Hindi daily publishing groups such as Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar and Amar Ujala. However in the past year, we have observed the resurgence of some of the groups that seemed to have been left behind. These include groups such as Rajasthan Patrika, Nai Dunia, Punjab Kesri. These now seem ready for expansion and have already started some new editions.

The heavyweight English groups such as HT Media and Bennett Coleman also seem unwilling to surrender the growth possibilities of their Hindi dailies Hindustan, and Navabharat Times. Among these two it must be said that HT Media seems more serious about growing Hindustan than Bennet Coleman is about Navabharat Times which in fact has now shrunk to only its Delhi and Mumbai editions.

There is also a spate of new Hindi dailies such as Aaj Samaj, Abhi Abhi, Rashtraprakash, and Chauthi Duniya that have just started up in the past year. In this latter group it is not clear which have been started just for the next general election and which are serious newspaper publishers. On the other hand, ad revenues are under tremendous pressure throughout the newspaper industry and many of the dailies are cutting costs and consolidating regional editions.

The World Association of Newspapers quotes the Registrar of Newspaper of India’s figures of 1700 Hindi dailies generating a circulation of approximately 28 million copies. From our own data gathering it would seem that just the ten leading Hindi newspapers produce 12.25 million copies daily or almost 52 per cent of the entire Hindi circulation which implies that there is a tough time ahead for the many smaller newspapers.

According to the 2001 census the Hindi speaking population across twelve states is 516 million. Although the claimed literacy figure is 57 per cent, we can assume a 50 per cent figure of functional literates that could constitute Hindi newspapers’ potential readership. Of this figure of 258 million one might assume that 20 per cent or 51.5 million are potential buyers of a Hindi daily newspaper. However, one should bear in mind that literacy in the country as a whole is cited as being around 70 per cent and this would mean that if comparable literacy is achieved among the Hindi speaking population by let us say 2020, over 72 million dailies could be sold just to this demographic. Even pessimistically assuming that each copy of a Hindi daily is read by 7 to 9 persons, it is reasonable to expect that a daily circulation of 50 million copies is achievable in the next ten or twelve years.

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