A struggling grain trading firm grew into the company behind India's first Hindi satellite channel
Essel Group began in 1926 as a grain dealer in a Haryana market town and was deep in debt by 1967. Its turnaround came through government food contracts, packaging tubes and then television: Zee TV, launched in 1992 as India's first Hindi satellite channel, grabbed 65 percent of the satellite market within two years.
Jagannath Goenka founded the firm in Adampur, trading food grains. Business was rough: a move to Hisar in 1946, a pulse-polishing factory in Delhi that lost heavily and closed in 1951, and eventually steady profits selling polished grains to Gujarat and southern India. A run of losses in 1967 left the family 600,000 rupees in the red, before connections at the Food Corporation of India won them supply and storage contracts.
Goenka's grandson Subhash Chandra took control in 1973 and renamed the company Essel in 1976. A packaging arm making laminated tubes followed, and export deals for rice and soya beans flowed from trade agreements between India and the Soviet Union. In 1983 the group began investing in EsselWorld in Mumbai, which opened six years later as India's first amusement park and was meant to announce ambitions in entertainment. It never made a profit and shut in 2023.
Television delivered the real breakthrough. To get Zee's programmes on air, Essel formed a joint venture with Star TV to lease a transponder on the AsiaSat satellite, and Zee TV started broadcasting on 1 October 1992. It stayed market leader until 2000, the year Zee bought out Star's share and freed its partner to compete in Hindi. Zee News, launched in 1998, became India's first round-the-clock Hindi news channel, and the group added cable distribution, satellite television through Dish TV, and chains of preschools. It even founded the Indian Cricket League, which managed two seasons between 2007 and 2009 without catching on.
Financial trouble in 2019 forced asset sales, including its packaging business and stakes in Zee Entertainment, and the Goenka family's holdings in several of its companies shrank sharply.
Source: Essel Group
