The Times of India

• 1. Introduction

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  The Times of India published its first edition on the 3rd of November 1838, and has never stopped. Nearly two centuries later, it holds the title of the largest-selling English-language daily newspaper in the world. It is also the oldest English-language newspaper in India, and the second-oldest Indian newspaper still in circulation. Readers have long called it "The Old Lady of Bori Bunder", a nickname that hints at the paper's age and at the city where it first took shape.

  Near the beginning of the 20th century, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, called it "the leading paper in Asia". Decades on, the BBC ranked it among the world's six best newspapers. Yet the same institution has also been called the architect of one of the most corrosive practices in modern Indian journalism: the sale of news coverage for money. How did a paper founded to cover dispatches from Britain end up shaping, and at times distorting, the very idea of a free press? That question runs through every chapter of its long life.

• 2. From Bombay to a Nation

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  J. E. Brennan was the paper's first editor, presiding over a publication called The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce. It ran on Wednesdays and Saturdays, published under the direction of Raobahadur Narayan Dinanath Velkar, a Marathi social reformer. Brennan died in 1839, and George Buist took the chair. Under Buist, the paper became a daily in 1850.

  Buist held a firmly pro-British editorial line, and tensions with shareholders ran deep. A Parsi shareholder named Fardoonji Naoroji pushed hard for a different stance, particularly as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 unfolded. Buist refused to move. After a shareholder meeting forced his departure, Robert Knight stepped in, and the paper's character changed.

  Knight, who lived from 1825 to 1892, bought out the Indian shareholders' interests in 1860, merged with a rival publication called the Bombay Standard, and launched India's first news agency. It wired Times dispatches to newspapers across the country. Knight also secured the Indian agency for Reuters news service. In 1861, he renamed the paper The Times of India. He spent years fighting for a press free from intimidation by governments, business interests, and cultural authorities alike. By the close of the 19th century, the paper employed more than 800 people and circulated across both India and Europe.

• 3. Ownership in Turmoil

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  Ownership shifted several times across the paper's early decades until 1892, when an English journalist named Thomas Jewell Bennett and his partner Frank Morris Coleman acquired it through a joint stock company they named Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. Coleman later drowned in the 1915 sinking of the SS Persia.

  Sir Stanley Reed then edited the paper from 1907 until 1924. He received correspondence from major Indian figures including Mahatma Gandhi, lived in India for fifty years in total, and was respected in the United Kingdom as an authority on Indian affairs. In 1946, as India moved toward independence and the British owners departed, Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd was sold to sugar magnate Ramkrishna Dalmia.

  The Vivian Bose Commission of Inquiry, reporting in 1955, found that Dalmia had engineered the acquisition in 1947 by transferring money from a bank and an insurance company he chaired. The court case that followed ended with Dalmia sentenced to two years in Tihar Jail for embezzlement and fraud. He spent most of that sentence in hospital. When he was released, his son-in-law Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain, who had been running the company in his absence, refused to let him resume control.

• 4. Courts, Control, and the Jain Family

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  Shanti Prasad Jain's own record was no cleaner. In the early 1960s, he was imprisoned for selling newsprint on the black market. The same Vivian Bose Commission report that had implicated Dalmia also included specific charges against Jain. The Government of India used those findings to petition a court for the removal of the company's management.

  On the 28th of August 1969, the Bombay High Court under Justice J. L. Nain passed an interim order disbanding the existing board of Bennett, Coleman & Co. and forming a new one under government direction. The court reasoned that the company's affairs were being conducted in a manner prejudicial to public interest. Jain lost his directorship. A Bombay High Court judge was appointed chairman. The government's appointed chairman, D K Kunte, had no prior business experience and simultaneously held a seat as an opposition member of the Lok Sabha.

  In 1976, during India's Emergency period, the government transferred ownership back to Ashok Kumar Jain, the son of Shanti Prasad Jain and the grandson of Ramkrishna Dalmia. Ashok Kumar Jain is the father of the current owners Samir Jain and Vineet Jain. In 1998, the Enforcement Directorate pursued Ashok Kumar Jain over alleged illegal transfers of funds amounting to US$1.25 million to an overseas account in Switzerland, and he fled the country.

• 5. Defiance and Wit

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  On the 26th of June 1975, the day after India declared its state of emergency, the Bombay edition of the paper ran a notice in its obituary column. It read: "D.E.M. O'Cracy, beloved husband of T.Ruth, father of L.I.Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope and Justice expired on the 25th of June." The wordplay spelled out democracy, truth, liberty, faith, hope, and justice in a single mock death notice.

  The message was a pointed critique of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's 21-month emergency, a period now widely regarded as an episode of broadly authoritarian rule. The paper's willingness to slip that notice into print at that moment has been remembered as one of the more inventive acts of press resistance in Indian journalism. Its author was never named in the public record that survives.

• 6. The Paid News Problem

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  In 2005, the Times of India began what it called "private treaties", later renamed Brand Capital. Under this arrangement, new companies, films, and organisations seeking coverage were offered sustained positive placement in the paper's news columns in return for shares or other financial obligations to Bennett, Coleman & Company. By 2012, according to a critical article in The New Yorker, BCCL had acquired stakes in 350 companies and was generating 15% of its revenues from the arrangement.

  A separate programme, called Medianet, ran on a more transactional basis. If a company sponsored an event, the event would receive coverage in the paper, but the sponsoring company's name would be withheld from the article unless the company also paid for advertising. A report by a subcommittee of the Press Council of India in 2010 found that this paid news approach had spread to a large number of newspapers and more than 500 television channels across India.

  The blurring of editorial and advertising was documented in specific cases. When a lift in a 19-storey luxury apartment complex in Bangalore crashed, killing two workers and injuring seven, every other English-language and Kannada-language newspaper named the construction company, Sobha Developers. The Times of India did not. Sobha Developers was a private-treaty partner. An article that first appeared in the Nagpur edition in 2008, making claims about the success of Monsanto's genetically modified cotton that critics said were factually incorrect, reappeared word for word in 2011, this time with a small-print label describing it as a "marketing feature".

  India's SEBI authority formally recognised the conflict-of-interest problem in July 2009. Managing director Vineet Jain has insisted that a wall exists between the sales operation and the newsroom, though he acknowledged that all private-treaty clients are listed on the company's website.

• 7. Competition and Sting

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  In 1994, when the Hindustan Times held the top position among Delhi's newspapers, the Times of India cut its cover price by a third, to one and a half rupees. The move was prepared in advance with an expanded advertising sales operation to offset lost circulation revenue. By 1998, the Hindustan Times had fallen to second place in Delhi.

  In Bangalore, the paper dropped its price to one rupee, a move that Siddharth Varadarajan, one of the paper's own editors at the time, publicly described as "predatory pricing". The paper was also drawn into a legal dispute with the Financial Times. In 1993, as the Financial Times was preparing to enter the Indian market, Samir Jain, the vice-chairman of BCCL, registered "Financial Times" as a trademark of his company. The move was widely read as an attempt to block the Financial Times from competing with BCCL's own Economic Times.

  In 2018, a sting operation by the investigative outlet Cobrapost captured Vineet Jain and Sanjeev Shah, executive president of BCCL, on camera discussing a proposal to promote right-wing editorial content across the group's media properties for payment, part of which the client indicated would be settled in black money. BCCL denied the allegation and described the footage as doctored and incomplete. Vineet Jain stated he had been conducting a reverse-sting of his own to expose the undercover reporter.