New Delhi: Beginning with a speech at the Economic Times Global Business Summit Saturday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to deliver a chain of addresses in three conclaves organised by prominent media houses in the next one week.
Apart from the two-day ET summit, where he will be chief guest, Modi is also set to address the News18 Rising India Summit on 25 and 26 February, as well as the India Today Conclave on 1 and 2 March. He will be joined by other top ministers and Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, including party president Amit Shah, as well as a host of political figures from opposition parties.
The choice of media houses is significant, because their parent companies — Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd (Times Group), Network 18 and the India Today Group — are among India’s largest media conglomerates, with a wide reach across languages, platforms and mediums.
BJP at the conclaves
The ruling BJP will be the party most widely represented across the three conclaves, with a slew of leaders slated to speak on a range of pre-decided issues.
At the ET summit, the PM’s address, advertised as the “highlight”, will be on the topic ‘Preparing India For the Future’. The PM, who returns from South Korea Friday night, is expected to speak at the summit for around 40 minutes beginning at 10:10 am Saturday.
Modi will be joined at the event by Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Railways Minister Piyush Goyal, Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad as well as Commerce and Industry Minister Suresh Prabhu, who will all give “special addresses” over the two day-event.
Union Textiles Minister Smriti Irani, meanwhile, will be part of a panel during a “Break-Out Session”, centred around the theme “Create, Nurture and Transform — The ‘Better’ Half”.
At the News18 Rising India Summit, the PM will deliver the keynote address Monday night on ‘Beyond Politics, Defining National Priorities’. Much like the ET summit, the News18 event will also see other top BJP ministers and leaders in attendance. BJP president Shah is scheduled to speak on Day 2 of the summit, with the session labelled ‘Mahabharat’ by the organisers.
Union Road Transport, Highways and Water Resources Minister Nitin Gadkari will speak at a session titled ‘India Ahoy: Growth and Gumption’, along with his cabinet colleagues Prasad and Goyal.
Irani, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Sports and Information & Broadcasting Rajyavardhan Rathore, MoS Heavy Industries Babul Supriyo, BJP national general secretary Ram Madhav as well as Lok Sabha MP Anurag Thakur will also address the summit. BJP allies like Meghalaya CM Conrad Sangma and the Lok Janshakti Party’s Chirag Paswan too are expected to address the summit.
The India Today Conclave, meanwhile, will be opened next Friday by BJP president Shah — known to be the party’s chief electoral strategist. He will speak on ‘War Diaries: Victories. Defeats. And notes from a democratic battlefield’.
PM Modi, meanwhile, will conclude the conclave Saturday night with ‘My India Story: What leading a great country taught me’.
Ministers Gadkari, Goyal, Rathore and Kiren Rijiju, the MoS for Home Affairs, top BJP leaders including Madhav and Vinay Sahasrabuddhe as well as senior Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma are all slotted to speak at the conclave, as is Swaminathan Gurumurthy, part-time director of the Reserve Bank of India and co-convenor of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch.
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The opposition camp
While no non-BJP leader is scheduled to speak at the ET Global Summit, the other two conclaves are expected to see a fairly healthy participation from the opposition camp as well.
At the News18 Summit, for instance, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister and senior Congress leader Kamal Nath will speak as part of a session called ‘Matter of States’. The Congress CMs of Punjab and Chhattisgarh — Captain Amarinder Singh and Bhupesh Baghel respectively — will give each other company talking about ‘The Other Narratives’.
The Nationalist Congress Party’s Supriya Sule, the Congress’ Sachin Pilot, R.P.N. Singh and Divya Spandana, National Conference leader and former Jammu and Kashmir CM Omar Abdullah, Telugu Desam Party’s Nara Lokesh, TRS leader K. Kavitha, Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Tejashwi Yadav and Rashtriya Lok Dal’s Jayant Chaudhary are also speakers at the event.
At the India Today Conclave, top Congress leaders like former union ministers P. Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal and Shashi Tharoor are slated to speak, as are Jyotiraditya Scindia and Pilot.
Former Uttar Pradesh CM and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, YSR Congress’ Jagan Mohan Reddy, political analyst and Swaraj India chief Yogendra Yadav, and prominent Dalit voice Jignesh Mevani, the MLA from Gujarat’s Vadgam, are also on the programme. Conrad Sangma will represent the Northeast at the conclave.
Extensive reach
All the three organisers are part of mega media groups, with a gamut of products and massive reach.
The Times Group, for instance, runs top publications like The Times of India, Economic Times, Navbharat Times and the Mirror in various cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad, plus TV channels like Times Now, Mirror Now and ET Now. It also has a significant presence in the vernacular press in Maharashtra, Karnataka and West Bengal, among other states and languages.
As per data available with the Indian Readership Survey (IRS), The Times of India had a monthly readership of 1.3 crore (as recorded in 2017), while Economic Times, Mumbai Mirror and Navbharat Times had a readership of 31 lakh, 18 lakh and 76 lakh respectively. Vijaya Karnataka — its Kannada paper — had a readership of 69.25 lakh, while the corresponding figure for the Bengali paper Ei Samay was 26 lakh.
Among the group’s TV channels, Times Now ranks No. 3 among Indian English news channels, according to the Broadcasting Audience Research Council (BARC). With 611 ‘weekly impressions in thousands’ it sits behind state broadcaster Doordarshan (1,503) and Republic TV (725).
The Network 18 group, meanwhile, runs TV channels like CNBC Awaaz, CNN-News 18, CNBC TV18, News 18 India and 14 regional language channels, besides news portals like Moneycontrol and Firstpost. On its website, the group claims to have “700 million TV viewers per month and 100 million digital viewers (unique views) per month”.
The India Today Group owns a number of magazines including the English and Hindi editions of India Today, the newspaper Mail Today, and television channels like Aaj Tak, India Today TV, Tez and Delhi Aaj Tak.
As per IRS data from 2017, India Today (English) was the most read magazine with a readership of 79 lakh, followed by India Today (Hindi) with 71 lakh (the basis being the respective periodicity).
The group’s channels, meanwhile, have an equally spread-out network. Aaj Tak boasts of over 1.9 lakh ‘weekly impressions in thousands’, while India Today TV registers 366 (about half of Republic TV).
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Social media reach
The groups also wield tremendous reach and influence on social media.
The main India Today handle has a following of 50.3 lakh on Twitter, 14 lakh subscribers on YouTube and nearly 98 lakh followers on Facebook. Aaj Tak, meanwhile, has 77.5 lakh followers on Twitter, 1.4 crore subscribers on YouTube, and 2.1 crore followers on Facebook.
The various media outlets under the Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd banner have impressive social media numbers as well.
Among news channels on Twitter, Times Now, Mirror Now and ET Now have a following of 87.6 lakh, 48,100 and 4.4 lakh respectively. Their subscribers on YouTube are 10 lakh, 86,000 and 1.88 lakh respectively, while the corresponding Facebook following is 55.31 lakh, 4.8 lakh and 8.4 lakh.
The Times of India has 9.72 lakh followers on Twitter, 9.68 lakh subscribers on YouTube and 1.09 crore followers on Facebook. For Navbharat Times, these figures are 7.36 lakh, 1.71 lakh and 66.24 lakh respectively. The Economic Times has a Twitter following of 4.4 lakh, YouTube subscription of 1.6 lakh and 42.44 lakh Facebook followers.
These are just the figures for the main handles, and not the sub-handles based on various categories.
Under the Network 18 umbrella, CNN-News 18 has 41 lakh million Twitter followers, 6.88 lakh YouTube subscribers and 61 lakh followers on Facebook. CNBC TV 18, meanwhile, has 6.29 lakh Twitter followers, 2.97 lakh YouTube subscribers and 15.9 lakh Facebook followers.
The Hindi channels — CNBC Awaaz and News 18 India — have Twitter followers amounting to 1.44 lakh and 9.64 lakh respectively, 6.53 lakh and 34 lakh YouTube subscribers, as well as over 70.57 lakh followers combined on Facebook.
With inputs from Deeksha Bhardwaj
TOI group has been a revelation. I never thought the group was so desperately head over heels in love with the BJP. Their lead newspaper never gave that impression, I always thought it was a balanced paper. But another of their group papers, ET didn’t think anyone else fit to be called at their meet other than these bogus nationalists. Not just that, TOI had some kind of a survey conducted recently which gave 83% chance to the BJP to win the elections. A private news website was good enough to describe that survey in detail, different questions that constituted it and answers given by people to each of those questions, and I could see easily, as the compere very correctly pointed out, that it was a survey conducted almost exclusively among the BJP supporters!! One wouldn’t expect that from the TOI of yore!
A fantastic opportunity to place before the people a detailed account of all the good work that has been done over the last five years.
How much? Where’s the money?