Who owns your media? A look at Zee News, ABP News and Dainik Bhaskar

Ever wondered who owns your favourite media house? This project is an effort to bring transparency to media ownership patterns.

Dainik Bhaskar

The information for this infographic is sourced from the annual report and returns filed by Dainik Bhaskar Corporation Ltd with the corporate affairs ministry and available on its website as of March 31, 2020.

Institutional investors and other public shareholders include Ocean Dial Getaway India Mauritius Ltd, Nalanda India Equity Fund, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, Azim Premji trust, the government of Singapore, and FIL Investment Mauritius.

The founding chairman of the Dainik Bhaskar group of newspapers, Ramesh Chandra Agarwal, died in 2017, prompting a change in the ownership pattern of Dainik Bhaskar Corporation Ltd.

Zee News

All information for this infographic is sourced from the annual returns filed by Zee Media Corporation Ltd with the corporate affairs ministry and available on its website as of March 31, 2020.

One point worth noting is that the largest shareholder in 25FPS Media Private Ltd and Arm Infra & Utilities is Primat Infrapower & Multiventures, holding 100 percent of the shares in both these companies.

Primat Infrapower & Multiventures is owned by a company called Sprit Infrapower & Multiventures, which was known as Sprit Textiles until 2017. The largest shareholder of Sprit Infrapower & Multiventures, holding a 51 percent stake, is Sushila Goenka, wife of Subhash Chandra.

Subhash Chandra is the founder of the Zee Group and is a Rajya Sabha MP. The promoter’s shareholding amounts to 44.86 percent, while the institutional and public shareholding is 55.14 percent.

ABP News

The chart is based on the revised shareholding as of March 31, 2019 of the ABP Group. The information for this infographic is sourced from the annual returns of ABP News Network Private Ltd and ABP Private Ltd for the year 2018-19, available on the corporate affairs ministry's website.

By Meghnad S and Anusuya Som.

With inputs from Pradipta Barik, Upasana R, Abhineet Nayyar, and Ayushi Mishra.

Graphic design by Shambhavi Thakur and Anubhooti Gupta.

Watch out for the second part of the series on May 30.

Update on Jan 31, 2022: A previous version of this story misspelled Azim Premji as Aziz Premjee; this has been corrected.

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This story is part of the NL Sena project, which over 75 of our readers contributed to. It was made possible thanks to Gaurav Ketkar, Pradeep Dantuluri, Shipra Mehandru, Yash Sinha, Sonali Singh, Prayash Mohapatra, Naveen Kumar Prabhakar, Abhishek Singh, Sandeep Kelvadi, Aishwarya Mahesh, Tushar Mathew, Satish Pagare, and other NL Sena members. Contribute to our next NL Sena project, The Economics of post-Covid India by Vivek Kaul, and help to keep news free and independent.

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