DreamDTH Explains: A guide to West Indian regional channels (Marathi and Gujarati)

Gujarati channels

Despite Gujarat being financially and politically one of the most important and influential states of India — especially since Prime Minister Narendra Modi hails from there — this has never been reflected in its TV channel landscape, which has always had a tiny number of non-news channels, though news channels have been numerous. The reason is simple: people in Gujarat actually prefer watching Hindi GECs and movie channels instead — as seen in the BARC weekly ratings, where the top 5 channels in Gujarat are almost always Hindi channels — with the result that Viacom18 has been the only broadcaster to take Gujarati seriously and operate dedicated non-news channels. Zee Gujarati, which closed down all the way back in 2009 — a decade and a half ago — was the only other player in the market.

Not only are Viacom18’s Colors Gujarati and Colors Gujarati Cinema the only private GEC and movie channels in Gujarat — since there is no channel in music, kids’ or other niche genres — but even in terms of news channels where there are plenty of players, Network18 has not only News18 Gujarati (formerly ETV News Gujarati) but even, strangely enough, a business channel in the form of CNBC Bajar. This makes sense since Gujarat is known for its large number of businessmen — including the Ambani and Adani families, among the richest in Asia and the world. (The Ambanis run Reliance Industries, which owns Network18 and hence Viacom18, while the Adanis acquired most of NDTV in 2022.) Thus, it is apt that CNBC Bajar should be the only business channel in a regional language.

That said, there are a large number of Gujarati news channels from a wide range of broadcasters: both national ones (ABP Asmita, TV9 Gujarati, Zee 24 Kalak, ITV Network’s India News Gujarat, in addition to News18 Gujarati and CNBC Bajar as above) but also those run by local media groups (GSTV, Sandesh News, VTV News, Mantavya News, Gujarat 1st 24×7, Praveg) — of which GSTV and Sandesh News are run by the Gujarati newspapers Gujarat Samachar and Sandesh, respectively. There are also two Hindu devotional channels, astonishingly enough for a language which overwhelmingly prefers news channels to other genres: Lakshya TV and the more recent Aastha Gujarati, which was added on DD Free Dish in 2023 as well as Tata Play.

Additionally, there are as many as 17 Vande Gujarat educational channels launched by the state government in 2015 that are available on DD Free Dish, similar to the 34 Swayam Prabha channels at the national level. Most Gujarati channels are naturally headquartered in Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat — which adjoins the capital, Gandhinagar (much like Assam’s capital, Dispur, is part of its largest city, Guwahati) — but the state also has other cities like Vadodara, Surat, Rajkot, Bhavnagar, Jamnagar, Bhuj and Porbandar, which is the birthplace of Mohandas Gandhi.

Table of major Gujarati broadcasters

Independent Gujarati channels and other channels from national broadcasters

• Government: DD Girnar
  • State educational: Vande Gujarat 1–17 channels on DD Free Dish
• Hindu devotional: Lakshya TV, Aastha Gujarati
• News: GSTV, Sandesh News, VTV News, Mantavya News, Gujarat 1st 24×7, Praveg; upcoming in 2024: NDTV Gujarati

A very limited lineup that is overwhelmingly controlled by Viacom18’s two Gujarati channels

The then-ETV Gujarati, the first — and, today, only — Gujarati GEC, was launched in 2002, in the same year as ETV Odia and a couple of years after ETV Kannada, Bangla and Marathi went on air. After Viacom18 — which had been newly acquired by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries — acquired the non-Telugu ETV channels in January 2014, ETV returned to being solely a Telugu-language broadcaster (as we have explored in our article on Telugu channels) until launching the ETV Bal Bharat children’s channels in 2021 in multiple languages. As such, Viacom18 introduced the Colors brand for its five regional channels — Colors Kannada, Bangla, Marathi, Gujarati and Odia — in 2015. Of these, Colors Gujarati went on air on 20 April 2015, a month after Colors Marathi on 22 March. An HD feed was rumoured in 2016, after Colors Kannada, Bangla and Marathi launched theirs, but did not come to pass.

On 1 June 2019, Viacom18 launched Colors Gujarati Cinema, some months after Colors Kannada Cinema and Colors Bangla Cinema — and these three channels (along with Colors Super, a secondary Kannada GEC) strangely place their logos in the top left corner, which is otherwise mostly used by Zee non-news channels, instead of the standard top right. These two Colors channels remain the only option for Gujarati TV, even as digital media companies like Shemaroo have capitalised on the Gujarati content market through their YouTube channels and OTT platforms, in the absence of Gujarati TV channels.

In fact, Zee used to have a Gujarati channel, Zee Gujarati, two decades ago, but it ceased broadcasting on 31 May 2009 (exactly a decade before Colors Gujarati Cinema was launched!) — and it has no plans to resurrect the channel, the way it brought back Zee Punjabi in 2020 after a hiatus of several years. Neither does Star have any intention to enter Gujarat, even though — astonishingly enough — Star Sports 1 Gujarati (along with Malayalam) had been rumoured some years ago, but they didn’t happen. However, there are two Hindu devotional channels in Gujarati: Lakshya TV has been present for several years, while Aastha Gujarati (owned by Aastha, one of India’s oldest Hindu channels) made an appearance in 2023: it was initially added in April on DD Free Dish as Aastha Tamil, before converting into Aastha Gujarati.

It may also be mentioned that in October 2015, the Gujarat state government launched 16 Vande Gujarat free-to-air educational channels on DD Free Dish — with VANDE being an acronym that stands for Video Audio Network for Development and Education — and a seventeenth in 2019. Though other state governments often have their own educational channels — especially in the South: Kalvi TV in Tamil Nadu, T-SAT Vidhya and Nipuna in Telangana, and Kite Victers in Kerala — none has as many as Gujarat. At the national level, the MHRD (Ministry of Human Resources and Development) launched 34 Swayam Prabha channels in 2017, which are more accessible and widespread in terms of their target audience — mostly schoolkids, though there are also some for higher education — than DD Gyan Darshan which is confined to the higher educational level.

Nevertheless, Gujarati has always been an important market for news channels

However, despite entertainment broadcasters other than Viacom18 never giving much importance to Gujarat, the state has always had a substantial number of news channels from both national and local broadcasters. TV9 was the first broadcaster to launch a Gujarati news channel: TV9 Gujarati went on air in 2007, not long after TV9 Telugu (then called just TV9) and TV9 Kannada (then Karnataka TV9) in the mid-2000s. Along with TV9 Marathi — as described earlier under Marathi news channels — these channels kept TV9 in the spotlight until it became a full-fledged national news network in 2019. The next few Gujarati news channels to be launched were all by local companies: VTV News in 2011, GSTV by the Gujarat Samachar newspaper in 2012, and Sandesh News (initially Satlon News) by the Sandesh newspaper in 2013, as well as Bizz News which has now ceased broadcasting.

Soon thereafter, in 2014, shortly after Network18 — now owned by Reliance — acquired the non-Telugu ETV channels, it launched ETV News-branded channels (which were never actually owned by ETV!) in Kannada, Bengali, Gujarati and Odia, whereas it was already present in Marathi in the form of IBN Lokmat. Not only ETV News Gujarati, but Network18 also went further and launched CNBC Bajar in July 2014 — the only business channel in a regional language, as stated earlier. All the ETV News channels adopted the News18 brand in 2018 — sometime after IBN Lokmat became News18 Lokmat in late 2017 — along with ETV’s legacy channels in Hindi-speaking regional states, and some new News18 channels in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Assam/Northeast; as such, ETV Gujarati became News18 Gujarati.

Another national news network, ABP — which had thus far had only three channels: ABP News (Hindi national), ABP Ananda (Bengali) and ABP Majha (Marathi) — entered its first new market (since acquiring those channels from Star in 2012) in January 2016 with the launch of its Gujarati channel ABP Asmita. These four are currently the only satellite channels of the network — since it closed the satellite versions of ABP Sanjha (Punjabi) and ABP Ganga (Uttar Pradesh/Uttarakhand) in July 2023, relegating them to digital-only feeds — but despite the small number of channels, ABP is one of India’s most important news networks with a vast presence. NDTV, too, is planning to launch NDTV Gujarati in the coming months along with NDTV Marathi and other regional channels, after years of operating only national Hindi and English channels.

Zee Media, for its part, launched its Gujarati news channel Zee 24 Kalak in August 2017 — a couple of months before the Zee network’s mega-rebrand in October 2017 — while ITV Network (which operates the India News channels in Hindi and other languages, and NewsX in English) launched India News Gujarat in December 2017. Since then, a number of local Gujarati news channels have gone on air: Mantavya News started satellite transmission in 2016 but was added by DTH platforms only from 2021 onwards, while Gujarat 1st 24×7 was launched in February 2022 and Praveg in July–August 2023. Praveg Communications has also applied for the trademark registration of Praveg TV, presumably a Gujarati GEC, but it is anyone’s guess as to whether it will actually be launched.

This concludes our comprehensive look at both Marathi and Gujarati TV channels, with the stark contrast between Marathi’s great importance at the national viewership level — particularly since Star Pravah is now firmly established as one of BARC’s national top 10 channels — and Gujarati’s near-irrelevance outside news channels. Our final DreamDTH Explains article for 2023 will focus on North Indian channels — Punjabi (where PTC is the dominant local broadcaster) as well as Haryanvi and Urdu (which have very few channels) — which will be the finishing touch to our exploration of the Indian TV industry for more than a year across all languages, broadcasters and genres.