The Rise Of India’s Booming Media Business

The businessIndia Daily Life

A combination of factors have gotten India to this place. The first and most obvious is a growing population that’s also increasingly literate. According to a 2012 study by UNESCO, India’s literacy rate, which was less than 50 percent in 1990, is projected to be about 71 percent by 2015. That’s by no means ideal from a development perspective, but in a country with 1.2 billion people, at the very least it means a dramatic increase in readers.

“When someone is literate, the first thing he or she wants to do is to be able to read a newspaper,” Magdoom Mohamed of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers told The WorldPost, “and show to the world that he or she reads a newspaper.”

Mohamed pointed out that a lot of the media growth seen in India is coming from areas where Internet connectivity is low, and where news media is just starting to penetrate.

“The real growth in media, especially for the print media, is coming from medium and smaller towns in India,” he wrote, “where people are getting hooked to newspaper readership.”

Vying to attract that growing readership are a number of established newspapers and media groups with a long history of publishing in English, Hindi and other languages. The Times of India, a partner of The Huffington Post for HuffPost India and currently the most widely circulated English-language paper in the world, has operated since the late 1830s. Other publications got their start not long after.

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