Who Owns Your Media: The Indian Express empire and where it stands today

Who Owns Your Media?

Who Owns Your Media: The Indian Express empire and where it stands today

A Newslaundry series that deciphers the ownership of India's major news organisations.

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Twenty-three years ago, Robin Jeffrey, a professor of politics at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, had described Ramnath Goenka’s “Indian Express empire” as the “grandest version of newspapers with some link to the ‘freedom struggle’” in his book. When Goenka died in 1991, Jeffrey wrote in India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-Language Press (1977-99) that “his newspapers were published in cities and towns in every region of India except Calcutta and the east.”

But the Indian Express was not started by Goenka. It was started in 1932 by Varadarajulu Naidu, an ayurvedic doctor and Congressman. According to Warrior of the Fourth Estate by BG Verghese, the newspaper was priced at one anna and published by Naidu’s Tamil Nadu press. In the first issue on September 5, 1932, the front page was solely devoted to seven display advertisements and the masthead was ornate with a crest resembling a coat of arms inscribed with a Tamil motto.

While the book doesn’t say what that motto was, it does give us the credo Naidu declared in the first editorial of this fledgling newspaper:

“Owing no allegiance to any political party in the country, it will stand staunchly for freedom in all national spheres of activity. Non-communal in outlook, it will advocate justice to all communities in political, social and economic life with a view to welding all of them into a great Indian Nation.”

But running a daily newspaper even then was no easy feat. Verghese writes, within weeks, Naidu was in financial trouble and sold the paper to Swaminathan Sadanand, who had founded nationalist news agency Free Press Service and would later start Free Press Journal. A year later, with Ramnath Goenka’s support, the Express opened an office in Madurai and launched a sister paper in Tamil, Dinamani.

Sadanand too began struggling. That’s when Goenka stepped in, bailing Sadanand out by buying debentures worth Rs 30,000. Yet, financial difficulties persisted. Dinamani came under government scrutiny and Free Press Service collapsed in 1935.

So, on October 1, 1936, Publicity Madras Ltd was floated with Goenka as managing director holding 51 percent shares. Sadanand held the balance.

The book says that C Rajagopalachari, premier of the Madras presidency in the late 1930s, had urged Goenka to rescue and rebuild Indian Express, but Sadanand fought to regain control. Relations strained and a legal battle ensued. Meanwhile, Sadanand introduced several innovations and reduced the newspaper’s price.

Goenka finally reached out to Jamnalal Bajaj for financial help to buy Sadanand’s stake. Bajaj did help, but the book says it can’t be ascertained how he helped. It also doesn’t confirm whether this was when Indian Express’s complete buyout by Goenka took place.

But Verghese writes that although Sadanand and Goenka “parted company over control of the Indian Express in Madras, they remained close friends and had mutual regard for one another”.

Ramnath Goenka: Bania from Bihar to a national media baron

Goenka was born in 1904 to a Rajasthani bania family in Bihar. He was six months old when his mother died and was adopted by his paternal uncle’s widow. Verghese writes that Goenka got little formal schooling in Darbhanga and Janakpur in Nepal. At the age of 12, he was married to 10-year-old Moongi Bai with whom he later had three children: Bhagwandas, Krishna and Radha.

While the book is unable to explain why Goenka had to leave studies early, it determines that Goenka was 16 when he joined his adopted mother’s merchant brothers in Calcutta. He also apprenticed with an established yarn and piece goods dealer.

During the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, apparently Goenka too was rounded up for joining a protest against the Rowlatt Act. Verghese guesses the Marwari community would have been alarmed – politics and business didn’t mix, after all – and sent him away to distant Madras.

This may have sowed the seeds of nationalism in Goenka’s heart, later inspiring him to enter the media and use it to carry the torch of nationhood throughout his life.

Goenka started his independent journey as a partner in a financial broking company in 1926. In the same year, at just 22, he was elected to the Madras Legislative Council as a trade and commerce representative. He was involved in a variety of business ventures. It was also in these years that his tryst with real estate began which, as Verghese writes, time and again proved a hedge against the political and commercial misfortunes faced by his newspapers.

Besides taking over Indian Express and Dinamani, Goenka started Andhra Prabha in 1938 and eventually owned a chain of newspapers throughout South India. In 1944, he started the Nationalist with Syama Prasad Mukherjee and also handed him the sister paper, Bharat, but they soon parted ways.

In 1945, Goenka launched Eastern Express on his own in Calcutta. It failed, Verghese writes, and was sold to the Jain Trust in 1946. But what did succeed that year was his takeover of Morning Standard and Sunday Standard from NJ Hamilton, an Irishman who started both papers after quitting the Illustrated Weekly of India.

Also successful was Sadanand and Goenka’s proposal to the Indian and Eastern Newspaper Society to launch a news service cooperatively owned by the newspapers of India. Thus, Press Trust of India was born; it was incorporated in Madras on August 27, 1947.

Two years on, the Express group launched its Marathi daily Loksatta, Marathi magazine Lok Prabha, and film magazine Screen. In 1952, Gujarati language Jansatta and Loksatta were registered and published from Ahmedabad and Baroda.

Goenka first got involved with Chronicle in 1948, when Tej group’s Deshbandhu Gupta began running losses and wanted to partner. Later, when Gupta died in a car crash (in 1951), Goenka was compelled to take it over. Chronicle had been renamed Indian News Chronicle when they’d partnered, and was now rechristened Delhi Express, and eventually Indian Express in 1953. Jansatta too got a Delhi edition.

In 1957 came Indian Express’s Madurai edition followed by editions in Bangalore (1965) and Ahmedabad (1968). Financial Express appeared in 1961 and Kannada Prabha in 1967.

In the mid 1970s, Goenka – who had become a great supporter of Jayprakash Narayan after his disillusionment with the Congress – felt JP needed a paper to promote his message and movement. Everyman and its Hindi counterpart Prajaniti were launched and treated as separate entities to avoid compromising Express’s identity and credibility. Both eventually folded.

The Emergency: Great pain, great fame

During the Emergency years from 1975 to 1977, LK Advani famously said the media was asked only to bend – but it crawled.

Robin Jeffrey wrote:

“A few publications, including Raj and Romesh Thapar’s Seminar, closed down in protest against censorship...But large newspapers were simply too vulnerable: they needed electricity, newsprint, access to their presses – all of which could be quickly halted by a determined government. Their owners and journalists had commitments: assets to lose, mouths to feed, school fees to pay, cars to run. Mrs Gandhi abolished the Press Council, merged the four existing news services into one, and even forced Ramnath Goenka to reconstitute the board of the Indian Express chain with KK Birla, already chairman of the Hindustan Times, as chairman. As well as censorship, the threat of closure and the arrest of journalists, the central government used advertising unblushingly to reward the cooperative and punish the recalcitrant. Central government expenditure on advertising more than trebled during the ‘emergency’, and pliable newspapers found not only the volume of advertisements increase, but also the rate for them.”

Indian Express was, according to this report, the leader in putting up a resistance. Along with Statesman, it was the first to protest the Emergency in their pages. The day after the Emergency was announced, they left their editorial pages blank, a move soon followed by other publications.

Until the Emergency ended, the penalty for resistance for The Indian Express and Statesman was a complete ban on government advertising. Indian Express also faced sudden “electricity failures”, fomenting of strikes in the newspaper, raids on the Express offices, and notices sent in connection with income tax and the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act.

But Goenka was relentless, using all his might, tact and legal mettle to battle them so Express could keep the mighty pen writing.

When censorship was lifted, Britannica notes, Goenka’s newspapers published a series of exposés on forced sterilisations, mass resettlements of the very poor, widespread corruption, and political arrests. These reports, it says, were a key factor in Indira Gandhi’s defeat in 1977 and the Janata Party’s rise.

When Gandhi was reelected in 1980, Indian Express was again deluged with notices on tax and property violations. A truce was called only after she was assassinated in 1984 and succeeded by Rajiv Gandhi.

But 1987 onwards, Brittanica says, Indian Express’s stinging editorials and cartoons against Rajiv Gandhi were largely credited with securing VP Singh’s election victory in 1989.

War on values leads to corporate war

That said, a lot of Indian Express’s exposés about questionable governmental favours, official corruption, Bofors and more resulted really from a fallout with Dhirubhai Ambani.

Here’s an excerpt from Verghese's book:

“Like RNG, Dhirubhai was prone to bet on people who were out of power as that, he felt, was a time to build relationships. Thus he had cultivated Indira Gandhi after 1977. In what was still a licence-permit raj, he thought it best to go along with the government and accordingly sought proximity to Rajiv Gandhi when he assumed office in succession to his mother...RNG and Dhirubhai enjoyed a warm and cordial friendship. Indeed, when Reliance made a rights issue in 1985, Dhirubhai obtained from RNG names of media persons who might be offered shares from the promoter's quota...Then came the breach. The story goes that RNG and Dhirubhai were seated side by side on a Delhi-Bombay flight. In the course of conversation Dhirubhai apparently remarked that everybody had his price, even journalists, and, depending on his potential worth, he (Dhirubhai) would aim ‘a silver or golden boot’ at him. Those close to Dhirubhai deny any such crudity.”

Further, Verghese wrote Goenka, who was then chairman of PTI, was incensed on learning from its general manager that a story published by PTI had been planted. Moreover, other such alleged plants followed on matters concerning RIL – one or two in Indian Express and Financial Express too.

Verghese writes: “RNG was furious. He felt that if Dhirubhai could buy the Express and PTI, he could buy the whole country and manipulate the media. The man had to be stopped.”

That’s when Goenka decided to take on Reliance and investigate its corporate war with Bombay Dyeing, RIL’s principal rival in the petrochemical arena.

Structural changes and succession

Like Robin Jeffrey, Verghese too noted that by the late 1980s, “the Express was a sprawling multiedition, multilingual chain, the likes of which had been unknown in India any time before.” In just 43 years, Goenka noted in a letter during the Emergency, he had made the organisation India’s largest with a circulation of about a million copies a day!

But Goenka also realised that the paper was rapidly losing its place. He wanted to reinvent it, give it a distinct personality. His strategy was two-pronged. The first was to pad all news and analysis with social and economic context while continuing to give equal space to investigative stories. The second was to better tap the regional space since, as he observed, Indian languages were fast replacing English everywhere. For this, he suggested assigning resident editors to regional editions so they could develop them into newspapers in their own right, as “autonomous units of a national chain”.

Later on, another matter of importance was succession. Goenka had struggled with this question after his son Bhagwandas suddenly died of a cardiac arrest in 1979.

Bhagwandas had married Saroj Jain, paternal aunt of TOI’s Samir and Vineet Jain and daughter of SP Jain. Verghese’s book notes that the grandchildren – from Goenka’s daughters because Saroj and Bhagwandas had no children – were inducted into the management to assess their capabilities.

Goenka narrowed it down to his daughter Krishna’s son Vivek Khaitan and his daughter Radha’s son Manoj Sonthalia. They’d variously managed the Bombay and Delhi centres, and the Madras and southern editions, respectively.

Goenka had also considered a trust as, like some senior editors and close friends, he too considered Express something of a national institution. But after a massive heart attack in 1991, he adopted Vivek and reconstituted the Express board with close associates like Nusli Wadia, Venu Srinivasan and Vivek. The adoption caused a rift in the family. That’s also when Vivek took on Goenka as his last name. We’re not sure when the spelling of his first name changed, but in MCA documents from the mid-2000s it’s ‘Viveck’.

The group’s shareholding also underwent changes. The property companies were separated from the newspaper ones, with most of the former going to Saroj while Ramnath became almost the sole owner of the newspaper companies.

Goenka decided to transfer 62.72 percent shares to Viveck and 33.12 to Manoj. Radha Sonthalia held the balance 0.16 percent. After Goenka’s death in 1991, Nusli Wadia honoured that commitment.

Manoj and Saroj challenged this in the Madras High Court but got no relief. Manoj and Viveck eventually entered into a settlement in 1995 whereby Sonthalia took charge of the Madras, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Cochin and other southern editions, while Viveck kept Delhi, Chandigarh, Bombay, Pune and Gujarat as well as Financial Express. Manoj’s southern fold eventually became the New Indian Express.

Saroj too settled in 1997, inheriting a large part of the property companies but no share in the newspaper business.

Gen Next: Split, struggles, recovery

In the years that followed, Indian Express – now only denoting Viveck’s group – didn’t do too well. In 2007, Mint reported on a grim but candid letter by Shekhar Gupta, Express’s then CEO and editor in chief, to employees.

He wrote, “In a year when the media industry has grown by nearly 25%, our revenues have declined by 3%.” He added that it “does look to me as if all of us took our eye off the ball...The truth is that we have been much too forgiving with ourselves in a marketplace getting less forgiving by the day.”

Gupta said he’d requested members of the top management team to take a wage freeze for the year, while deferring a significant part of his own compensation until “we see some real improvement”. Further, Gupta said “the action with some others amongst us, in the senior team, I am afraid, had to be harsher. Some others are under close watch. I can say very little on this except to add that nothing would make me happier than being able to report a turnaround to you, and I do hope that, working together, that day will come soon.”

Mint said the group at the time was looking for private funding while also toying with the idea of going public. Neither explorations seem to have fructified. In fact, in 2015, Vivek’s son Anant Goenka doused rumours with an official clarification stating that Indian Express was not up for sale – not to Ambani nor to News Corp, as whispers suggested. He also said the company had posted a good profit in 2014-15 and that Loksatta ramped up circulation, seeing a 25 percent jump in ad revenues. They had also invested in a new office building in Noida.

This was just seven years after Shekhar Gupta’s grim letter and around the time of his final exit as editor in chief in June 2014. He had already stepped down as CEO in 2013, reportedly emailing employees that his job on the corporate side – undertaken in unusual circumstances – was done. The “sense of imminent crisis” no longer existed with the company having reported “six stellar quarters” and heading for an “even better seventh”.

Gupta said Viveck Goenka now had the “time to take over the management”. George Varghese was appointed CEO. There were also talks of changing flagship brand Indian Express’s tagline – “Journalism of Courage” – to a new one as part of a redesigning exercise. But it has remained intact. Gupta, meanwhile, went on to have a short stint at India Today and then launched his own news portal, the Print.

These profitability claims were also supported by the Hoot’s 2017 report which found that the group “managed a strong turnaround from losses of Rs 12.92 crore in 2013-14 to profits of Rs 60.6 crore in 2014-15”. Further, the group’s flagship company, The Indian Express Private Ltd, had seen a “steady improvement in the core business”.

The report attributed this to factors such as the consistent rise in revenues (especially ad revenues), sharp uptake in operating profit from one percent to 15 percent in 2015-16 owing to falling newsprint prices, better cost control, and the conclusion of Majithia arrears payouts. Additionally, as it had also paid down its borrowings that cut interest cuts by 80 percent in the previous four years, and set off its accumulated losses of Rs 22.6 crore, giving it the ability to plough back a surplus of Rs 17.7 crore into its reserves.

During Gupta’s tenure, the Indian Express won the International Press Institute’s Award for Outstanding Journalism three times. It won the inaugural award in 2003 for its sustained coverage of the 2002 Gujarat riots, and then in 2006 for reportage on how crores meant for the 2005 Bihar flood victims were syphoned off by politicians and other officials , as well as reportage on the disappearance of tigers from India’s national parks. In 2009, Indian Express bagged the award for the third time for investigating links between Hindu extremists and the terror attacks in Malegaon (2006) and Modasa (2008).

Gupta too won several awards in this time including the Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed Memorial Award for National Integration in 2008 and the Padma Bhushan in 2009.

Other noteworthy changes around Gupta’s exit included the sale of the group’s landmark property, Express Towers, in July 2014. Quartz reported that Express Towers – “built by a spunky newspaper baron, who set out to build South Asia’s tallest tower in 1972, and succeeded” – was sold to the American private equity firm Blackstone and Pune-based Panchshil Realty for Rs 870 crore.

Prior to the sale, Express Towers was owned by Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd, the group’s realty arm, in which ICICI Ventures had 49 percent stake. The group was to continue to hold a residual stake as it had offices and a printing press in the building, but in 2017, the group reportedly “bought 15,645 sq ft of space” in the adjacent Mafatlal Centre “for Rs 34 crore or Rs 21,732 a sq ft from Japanese company Mitsui & Co.”

Business Standard had also reported sources as saying that media operations would be vacated from Express Tower, although a small office might be retained. It’s proven true. Today, the group’s registered office is Mafatlal Centre. Moreover, Viveck Goenka’s official address, as per ministry of corporate affairs documents, has also changed from the first floor of Express Towers to Shalimar Building in Bandra. Anant Goenka’s official address continues to be the penthouse in Express Towers. Viveck and his daughter Rachel also own a restaurant called Sassy Spoon on the ground floor of Express Towers.

In 2015, the Express group also sold its weekly film magazine Screen, which hosted the Screen Awards, to Star India.

Digital rise

Hoot’s 2017 report said the group remained “quite single-handedly focused on the print business, with over 90 percent of its revenues coming from either advertisements or subscriptions to its range of newspapers”. ICRA’s 2016 report noted that The Indian Express Private Ltd (TIEPL) had 32 national editions and three language dailies that reached five million readers across the country.

The digital business picked up after Anant Goenka joined as whole-time director and head of new media. Forbes had reported that, as per Nasdaq-listed cross platform measurement company comScore, “when Anant joined the Express Group in 2012, the flagship brand’s website ranked number 15 in terms of news websites visited.” But by 2016, it had “jumped to number three, behind the Times of India and NDTV”. It boasted 42 million unique visitors each month, up sevenfold from 2012’s six million. The group also launched a mobile app.

Portfolio and places

TIEPL’s financial statement for FY2020 discloses that the company publishes its flagship English daily The Indian Express as well as Financial Express, Loksatta and Jansatta. As per data from the Registrar for Newspapers in India, Indian Express has registered publications from Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Delhi, Kolkata, Vadodara, Pune and Lucknow. The Nagpur edition publishes from Monday to Saturday.

The Sunday supplement Eye is published from Delhi, Pune, Howrah, Nagpur, Chandigarh and Mumbai. A weekly edition in Morena in Madhya Pradesh is registered under Chandra Prakash Shivhare. There’s also a biweekly edition called Indian Express Classified in Chandigarh.

Mumbai also has several monthly editions: Express Water, CRN, Express Pharma, Express Intelligent Enterprise, Express Channel Business and Express Computer. Express Hospitality is a fortnightly. As per its website, the pioneering Business Publication Division, launched in 1990, also included Express TravelWorld and Express Healthcare (possibly the same as Pharma).

Financial Express has daily editions from Howrah, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad; Monday to Saturday editions from Chandigarh, Pune and Lucknow; and weekly editions from Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Bengaluru North, Howrah, Pune and Lucknow, which have the Financial Express on Sunday.

Sunday Express publishes from Jaipur, Lucknow, Delhi, Nagpur, Howrah, Pune, Vadodara, Ahmedabad and Mumbai.

Loksatta has daily editions from Mumbai, Pune and Ahmednagar, and a Monday to Saturday edition from Nagpur. The weekly Ravivar Loksatta publishes from Ahmednagar, Nagpur, Pune and Mumbai. Mumbai also enjoys special issues like Loksatta Aarogyabhaan, Loksatta Arthabrahma, Loksatta Purnabramha, Loksatta Diwali and Loksatta Varsha Vedh.

Jansatta has daily editions in Kolkata, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Raipur, and Delhi as well as an annual edition in Howrah.

Although neither the FY2020 financial statement nor the website mention them, RNI data shows National Standard registered under TIEPL with a daily edition in Bengaluru, a half-yearly one from Delhi and Mumbai, and the National Standard on Sunday from Bengaluru (North). Also Lok Prabha Diwali, which has an annual edition in Mumbai.

The Express Group also hosts a number of awards and events, the most prominent award being the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards, instituted in 2006.

Ownership pattern

As of FY2022, Indian Express Holdings and Enterprises Private Ltd holds the majority shares (50.99 percent) in TIEPL. Forty percent are jointly held by Viveck Goenka and Anant Goenka. Shekhar Gupta, who’d unusually been given a stake over 15 years ago, continues to hold nine percent with his wife Neelam Jolly.

Single, nominee shares on behalf of Indian Express Holdings are held by Vaidehi Thakar, Poorvi Kamani, George Varghese, Monika Bansal, Vinayak Shete, Munnaram Prasad, Sandra Nazareth and Clarence Patrick Ferreira.

In turn, Indian Express Holdings and Enterprises Private Ltd is entirely owned by the father-son duo – 90.06 percent stake is held by Viveck Goenka jointly with Anant, 9.9 percent by Anant Goenka jointly with Viveck. Finally, the same nominee shareholders mentioned above, in addition to Neeta Fichardo and Bindu Kurryan, also hold single, nominee shares in IEHEPL on behalf of Viveck and Anant, amounting to 0.04 percent.

Moolah matters

Financial statements of TIEPL after 2020 were not available with the ministry of corporate affairs at the time of filing this story. But consolidated financial statements of Indian Express Holdings and Enterprises tell us that TIEPL incurred losses to the tune of Rs 2.73 crore in 2021 and Rs 1.1 crore in 2020, the Covid years. In FY 2019, it had booked a net profit of Rs 19.16 crore.

The other group companies’ performances during the same period were as follows.

NEW School Ventures Limited, IEHE’s wholly owned subsidiary, incurred a loss of Rs 49,000 in 2021, a net profit of Rs 66,000 in 2020, and a loss of Rs 1.69 lakh in the year before.

Jansatta Publications Private Ltd, also wholly owned, made a profit of Rs 80,000 in 2021, loss of Rs 19,000 in 2020, and a loss of Rs 8,000 in 2019.

IE Business Publications Private Ltd, where IEHE has a 51 percent holding, showed a profit of Rs 42,000 in both 2021 and 2020, and Rs 10,000 in 2019.

The Indian Express Print Media Ltd, wholly owned, incurred losses of Rs 43,000, Rs 4,000, and Rs 2.31 lakh in 2021, 2020 and 2019 respectively.

Indian Express Television Private Ltd, in which it has 82.3 percent shareholding, made a profit of Rs 8,000 in 2021 and made losses to the tune of Rs 20,000 and Rs 9,000 in the two years prior.

IE Media Private Limited, in which it has 83.2 percent holding, made a profit of Rs 8,000 in 2021, loss of Rs 20,000 in 2020, and of Rs 9,000 in 2019.

Global Fairs and Media Private Ltd, wholly owned, made a loss of Rs 51 lakh and Rs 1.37 crore in 2021 and 2020 respectively; its profits stood at Rs 4.52 lakh in 2019.

IGEAR Holdings Private Ltd, also wholly owned, made losses of Rs 96 lakh and Rs 81 lakh in 2021 and 2020 respectively.

Finally, MIC Insurance Web Aggregator Private Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary, showed a loss of Rs 60.86 lakh in 2020.

IEHE’s associate companies include IE Online Media Services Private Ltd and Indian Express Commercial Ventures and Projects Private Ltd.

Among IEHE’s clutch of subsidiaries, Hoot’s report observed that the flagship Indian Express Private Ltd brought almost all the revenues. Only two others – Indian Express Online Media Pvt Ltd, the digital division, and NEWSchool Ventures, which used to run the now-shut Express Institute of Media Studies – had any material operations. “All other subsidiaries appear to be shell companies with no revenues to report,” it said.

TIEPL’s last available statement, from 2020, also showed it owned shares with a market value of Rs 6.45 lakh in Bombay Dyeing & Mfg. Co. Ltd, shares worth Rs 7.96 lakh in Next MediaWorks Ltd (formerly Mid Day Multimedia Ltd), and shares worth Rs 29.72 lakh in Jagran Prakashan Ltd. It also owned some shares in PTI, UNI and Nepa Ltd (formerly The National Newsprint & Papers Mills Ltd).

Infographics by Gobindh VB.

All financial and ownership details are derived from financial statements and other company documents filed by the media house with the ministry of corporate affairs, the Bombay Stock Exchange, and the National Stock Exchange.

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