India: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

when newspaper circulations in many countries were in decline, Indian newspapers grew more than 250 per cent between 2004 and 2014. The Times of India, with 7.6 million readers, is the second largest circulated quality English-language newspaper in the world (WAN- IFRA, 2015) but it is by no means the largest in India. Seven newspapers in other languages have far greater reach (Table 1).

Table 1: Top 10 dailies in India

Source: Indian Readership Survey, 2014 (IRS measures readership, not circulation)

audiences as well as revenues. As a result, India hosts the largest and most vibrant media system in the world.

The first half of the 1990s was an inflection point for Indian media. If one were to conceive of phases of Indian media, there is no question that this period was the beginning of a new and distinct phase that continues to the present time. This phase represents a far-reaching qualitative change, driven by a sustained and rapid quantitative change. This phase is simply described here as the phase of explosive growth. The markers of the phases of Indian journalism proposed here are:

1. The formative phase, extending from the first newspaper in 1780 to 1919, encompassing social and spiritual as well as political concerns.
2. The nationalist phase, from 1919 to the attainment of Indian independence in 1947, marked most prominently by anti-colonial, pro-independence activism. Numerous political leaders including the Father of the Nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, were editors of newspapers.
3. The nation-building phase from 1947 to the end of the Emergency in 1977, marked most prominently by concerns of development, governance and secularism.
4. The aggressive journalism phase from 1977 to the early 1990s, marked most prominently by activism, investigative journalism and an assertion of the

media’s role in demanding accountability.

5. The phase of explosive growth, a substantive disjuncture from the past in numerous dimensions, including practices, structures and norms. This phase began with economic liberalisation in the early to mid-1990s and has shaped today’s media system.

Drivers of growth: Population, literacy and the economy

Although newspapers in India are growing slower than television, radio and online media, they still achieve enviable growth rates. Projections by industry analysts suggest that the print industry will continue to grow at nearly 8 per cent over the next five years (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Growth of the Indian print industry

Source: KPMG, 2016; PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2008, 2009, 2011

This growth is partly rooted in demographic factors. India has a population of 1.21 billion (Census of India, 2011) which is growing, becoming more urbanised and also more literate. India’s people are slowly moving from its 640,867 villages to nearly 8,000 urban settlements, making it easier for them to access media. Greater Mumbai has a population of more than 18 million, and there are 53 cities with more than a million residents. The share of population living in towns and cities increased from 25 per cent in 1991 to 31 per cent in 2011, adding up to an urban population of nearly 400 million. Simultaneously, the literacy rate rose to 74 per cent in 2011, up 22 percentage points in 20 years, adding a pool of readers larger than the populations of most countries. Figure 2 shows the explosion of newspaper readership in the first decade of this century.

Figure 2: Literate population aged more than seven years

Analysis based on data from the Census of India

At the same time, the penetration of newspapers in India is still relatively low, higher than the US and other developing economies such as South Africa and Brazil, but substantially lower than many others (Figure 3). This also goes to explain why newspaper publishers are confident of sustained growth in the medium term

Source: World Press Trends, 2011

The mushrooming audience base has had the effect of moving relationships between media beyond the zero sum game that exists elsewhere. Growth of other media does not necessarily draw readers away from newspapers, or if audiences do desert newspapers, fresh entrants to the pool compensate adequately. The rise of private news television in the mid-1990s, for instance, is credited by industry insiders with increasing the appetite for news, which is vividly illustrated by data on newsprint consumption (Figure 4).

Source: Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)

Europe and one-third of that in the US. Although poverty is widespread, GDP growth has meant greater disposable income and purchasing power, as shown in Figure 5.

Business strategy

regional audiences and other media outlets ranging from online media and radio and television stations to outdoor advertising. In effect, they try and capture as large and varied an audience as they can to offer to advertisers.

In a market that is crowded in terms of numbers, expansion into fresh geographical areas and media has become as much a strategy of survival as a sound business plan driven by advertiser interest in rural and semi-urban areas which now exhibit buying power (Jain, 2016). Digital technology has facilitated rapid expansion of newspapers through facsimile and remote editions which offer customised and localised newspapers for relatively small geographical areas, sometimes as small as one small town or one district (India’s 29 states and 7 union territories have 687 districts). The Times of India multiplied from 12 to 33 editions in the four years from 2010 to 2014, and the publishers of the Hindi newspaper Dainik Jagran have enlarged their footprint from one newspaper in one language in one state to more than 130 editions across 11 titles in five languages reaching 69 million readers in 15 of India’s 29 states.

Even though big players such as The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar and Malayala Manorama dominate their home markets, they often struggle in the fresh markets that they seek to enter. The strategy of choice is to hurt existing market leaders in their wallets by starting a price war. Soon after Rupert Murdoch initiated a price war in the UK by dropping the prices of The Sun and The Times in the early and mid-1990s, The Times of India also dropped its price in Delhi, where it was trying to unseat Hindustan Times as the market leader (Whitaker, 1994).

Today, price wars, especially when an outside newspaper attempts to break into an established market away from its home, have become an integral element of the strategy of expanding into new geographical and linguistic markets. Newspaper cover prices have settled

at levels that are sustainable only by the leaders in each market, the top two or three who attract the bulk of audiences and an even larger proportion of the advertising. In India, the price for a 24- or 32-page broadsheet newspaper delivered to your doorstep is typically between Rs.2.00 and Rs.4. At the equivalent of £0.02–0.04, that is 2–4 British pence at pre- Brexit exchange rates, the selling price barely covers the cost of the printing ink used. Each copy is sold at a substantial loss, and the more copies that sell, the more money the publisher loses. Probably the only reason newspapers are not given away free is that they would disappear during distribution and would not reach the reader, being sold instead in bulk for recycling (in India, the price for newspapers as ‘raddi’ or scrap for recycling has varied between Rs.3 and Rs.5 per kg over the last two decades).

Questions of sustainability

concern that the strong dependence on advertisers renders newspapers susceptible to editorial pressures and that this in turn impacts editorial values.