Dainik Jagran History: From Jhansi in 1942 to India’s Most-Read Daily

Puran Chandra Gupta was born on 2 January 1912 in Kalpi, in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Before Jagran, he was already a nationalist publisher: in 1940 he launched Swatantra, a weekly from Kanpur. Accounts of his career say the printing operation later moved to Jhansi after it drew official disapproval. In 1942, the year the Quit India Movement began in August, he started the daily Jagran from Jhansi. Jagran’s own history names him as founder. Other accounts also credit associates, including J.C. Arya and Gurudev Gupta, with the early work.

Under British rule the press was tightly controlled. Paper and printing equipment were scarce in wartime, and censorship was a constant risk. A Hindi daily based in Jhansi rather than a big metro also had to find its own reporters, distribution and advertisers. The paper’s own history describes its founding idea as a “free voice of the people”. Behind that slogan, the practical choice was to report locally for readers the big city papers did not serve.

India became independent on 15 August 1947. On 21 September 1947, the paper relaunched from Kanpur, and 1947 is also the year sources give for the name Dainik Jagran (“daily Jagran”). The move made commercial sense. Kanpur was one of north India’s biggest industrial and trading cities, with mills, merchants and a dense population around it. The Kanpur edition became the paper’s commercial base for decades.

The next two moves were outside Uttar Pradesh: Rewa (1953) and Bhopal (1956), both in what is now Madhya Pradesh. The Indian Press Year Book for 1956 lists a claimed circulation of about 21,000 copies across Uttar Pradesh and Vindhya Pradesh. That is a small number next to the crores of readers that came later, but it is a documented baseline.

The Gorakhpur launch in 1975 took the paper into eastern Uttar Pradesh, where readers already had other papers to choose from. The same year, Puran Chandra Gupta was elected chairman of the Press Trust of India, and Jagran Prakashan was incorporated as a company on 18 July. The Emergency began in June 1975, and press censorship applied to every Indian paper, including this one. After that came Lucknow and Allahabad (1979), then Meerut (1984), Agra (1986) and Bareilly (1989). Together they gave the paper editions across most of Uttar Pradesh.

Puran Chandra Gupta died on 16 September 1986. His eldest son, Narendra Mohan, took over, followed later by Mahendra Mohan Gupta as chairman and managing director. Narendra Mohan’s son Sanjay Gupta became CEO and editor-in-chief. In 1990, the paper opened a Delhi edition, in one of the most crowded newspaper markets in the country.

After liberalisation in the 1990s, advertising budgets grew and literacy rose across the Hindi belt, which created many new newspaper readers. Hindi dailies found that India’s biggest news audience did not read in English. Published accounts say Jagran added 18 new editions between 1997 and 2006, and more in 2007–08. In March 2000, the company also absorbed the separate Jagran companies that ran the Delhi and Varanasi editions and the Rohilkhand (Bareilly) edition into one listed-company structure.

By the company’s own account, IRS 2003 made Dainik Jagran India’s most-read daily, with about 1.64 crore readers, and it stayed first in later rounds. ABC’s January–June 2004 audit counted 19,10,562 copies, making it the largest-circulated daily in India across languages for that period. Its 2005–06 annual report said it was the first Indian publication to cross 2 crore readers. The survey numbers kept rising. IRS 2019 Q1 reported about 7.36 crore total readers against 5.14 crore for second-placed Dainik Bhaskar. IRS 2019 Q4, a rolling average released in May 2020 during the pandemic, reported 6,86,67,000 total readers and an average issue readership of 1,68,72,000. It was still first among all Indian dailies.

In 2004, Independent News & Media, Tony O’Reilly’s Irish newspaper group, agreed to take a 26% stake in Jagran Prakashan for about Rs 150 crore. Some accounts date the deal to 2005, when it was completed. Jagran Prakashan’s IPO followed in 2006, and the family-run publisher became a company listed on the NSE and BSE. INM sold its stake by 2010.

After listing, the group added more titles. i-Next, a compact bilingual daily for readers aged roughly 18–35, became part of its print business. In 2010 it bought the print business of Mid-Day, which brought in the Urdu daily Inquilab. In 2012 it bought Madhya Pradesh’s Nai Dunia for an enterprise value of about Rs 150 crore. The group also bought Radio City, an FM network that had launched in 2001. Its own site now describes businesses in print, radio, digital, outdoor advertising and brand activations.

A printed paper comes out once a day. The internet updates all the time. Jagran moved online through Jagran.com, an e-paper that copied the print pages, and SMS short-code news services. Later came mobile apps and video. COVID-19 in 2020 disrupted newspaper delivery during lockdowns just as more readers turned to phones for news. The group’s 2023 annual report, citing Comscore data for April 2023, said its digital sites were among India’s top 10 news-and-information properties.

Print still earns most of the money. Jagran Prakashan reported consolidated revenue of about Rs 2,026 crore in FY2023–24, up about 3% on the year before, with print as its largest business. Recent quarters have shown the same pressure every Indian print publisher faces: newsprint costs, falling copy sales and advertising moving online.