The Indian Express

• 1. Introduction

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  The Indian Express arrived in 1932 with a doctor at the helm. P. Varadarajulu Naidu, trained in Ayurvedic medicine, launched the newspaper in Chennai, printed through his Tamil Nadu press. He had no publishing dynasty behind him, no inherited press empire. What he had was a vision for an English-language daily in a country that British rule still governed. Within a handful of years, ownership would change hands twice, a fire would gut the premises, and a rival newspaper would help keep the presses running. How did a struggling startup launched by a physician become one of India's most-read English papers? And what do the controversies that followed reveal about the role of a free press in modern India?

• 2. From Doctor to Press Baron

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  Swaminathan Sadanand entered the picture almost immediately after Naidu launched the paper. Sadanand, who had founded The Free Press Journal, bought the Indian Express from Naidu after the founder ran into financial trouble. He opened a second office in Madurai in 1933 and launched the Tamil edition, Dinamani, expanding the paper's reach into a second language.

  Sadanand cut the newspaper's price and brought in fresh publishing ideas. Yet the same financial pressures that had felled Naidu began closing in on him too. He sold a portion of his stake to Ramnath Goenka, structured as convertible debentures, a financial arrangement that would prove decisive. When The Free Press Journal collapsed in 1935, Goenka and Sadanand entered a protracted court battle. Sadanand lost, and Goenka gained full ownership of the Indian Express.

  Four years later, in 1939, Goenka extended his press holdings by acquiring Andhra Prabha, a prominent Telugu daily. The three papers he now controlled, Indian Express, Dinamani, and Andhra Prabha, came to be nicknamed the Three Musketeers.

• 3. Fire and Recovery

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  In 1940, the entire premises of the Indian Express was gutted by fire. The cause remained uncertain; the district judge who led the inquiry concluded that a short circuit or a cigarette butt could have started the blaze. The judge also noted that the growing city lacked adequate fire control infrastructure.

  What happened next says something about the relationship between competing newspapers. The Hindu, a direct rival, stepped in to help. The company lent Goenka's team their old building and allowed the Indian Express to be printed temporarily at one of its Swadesimithran presses. The Hindu later offered its recently vacated premises at 2 Mount Road on rent to Goenka. That address would eventually become the landmark Express Estates.

  The relocation carried an unexpected benefit: the Express was able to acquire faster, higher-quality printing machines. By 1952, the paper's circulation had reached 44,469.

• 4. Split After Goenka

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  Ramnath Goenka died in 1991. Eight years passed before the group formally divided. Two of Goenka's grandsons, Manoj Kumar Sonthalia and Viveck Goenka, separated the empire along a north-south line. Viveck Goenka took Indian Express Mumbai along with all the northern editions. Sonthalia received the southern editions, which were grouped under Express Publications Madurai Limited and headquartered in Chennai.

  The southern titles took on the name The New Indian Express, while the northern editions, based in Mumbai, kept the original Indian Express name, adding the article "The" as a prefix. The two halves of what had once been the same organisation now operated independently.

  On the 8th of July 1996, Indian Express began publishing daily on the internet. Five months after the website expressindia.com launched, it was drawing 700,000 hits every day, falling to roughly sixty percent of that figure on weekends.

• 5. Reach and Readership

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  According to the Indian Readership Survey of 2017, the Indian Express ranked as the sixth most-read English newspaper in India, with a readership approaching 1.6 million. Its circulation spread across several major cities, with Mumbai leading at around 160,000 daily copies and Delhi following at approximately 140,000.

  Pune accounted for roughly 90,000 copies, while Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, and Lucknow each sat in the 40,000-45,000 range. The newspaper's geographic footprint reflected its northern and western Indian base, a legacy of the family split that sent the southern titles under a separate banner. The paper is now headquartered in Noida and owned by Indian Express Limited, the successor entity to the Indian Express Group.

• 6. Controversy and Accountability

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  In May 2020, Indian Express reported that the Crime Branch of the Delhi Police had found an audio clip shared on WhatsApp to be doctored. The clip, which had circulated as a recording of Saad Kandhlawi urging Tablighi Jamaat members to ignore social distancing guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic, was flagged by the paper as manipulated.

  The Bureau of Police Research and Development initially included the clip in a report on fake news and disinformation vectors, then retracted it a day later. The Delhi Police pushed back, posting on Twitter that the Indian Express article was incorrect and summoning the reporter for questioning. The paper responded on Twitter that it had contacted Special Commissioner of Police Praveer Ranjan for comment before publication and that Ranjan had not replied.

  In 2022, the paper reported that the director generals of several Indian paramilitary forces had not been invited to the Republic Day parade. The forces in question later said the reporting was incorrect and that their director generals had in fact attended. In February 2025, Shashi Tharoor publicly accused the Indian Express of manipulating his words from a podcast, saying the paper had published a story claiming he had criticised the absence of a leader in the Kerala Congress, a characterisation he rejected as false.