India Today began with 5,000 copies and grew into India's most-read magazine
Launched in 1975 by a printing-press owner with his daughter as editor and his son as publisher, India Today started tiny. Within four years it passed 100,000 copies, and it went on to become the country's most widely read magazine, credited with bringing scientific election polling to Indian journalism.
Vidya Vilas Purie, who owned Thompson Press, founded the magazine with Madhu Trehan editing and Aroon Purie publishing. Its first run of around 5,000 copies reached 15,000 by the time the Emergency ended in January 1977, about 50,000 by that March, and more than 100,000 by December 1978. Trehan later moved back to the United States, and other editors took over as coverage widened from straight news into politics, business and public affairs. Editions followed in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam.
It pushed Indian journalism in new directions. Working with Prannoy Roy and David Butler in the 1980s, it popularised psephology, the statistical study of elections. An international edition launched in 1982 reached 104 countries, and in the late 1980s it became the first Indian outlet to send its own reporters abroad, covering the Tiananmen Square protests, the war in Afghanistan and the Soviet collapse. In June 1997, as liberalisation sped up the news cycle, it went from fortnightly to weekly.
The Purie family still runs it. In October 2017 Aroon Purie stepped back from day-to-day running of the group, and his daughter Kallie became vice-chairperson, and the publisher, Living Media India Limited, is jointly controlled with an investment company linked to the Aditya Birla Group. A sister English news channel, named after the magazine, launched in April 2003 alongside Aaj Tak, and in 2014 an opinion website called DailyO followed.
The readership numbers are large. A 2019 survey counted 9.24 million readers for the English edition and 7.02 million for the Hindi one, the two most-read magazines in the country. To mark 50 years, the January 2026 double issue ran to 600 pages, the biggest the magazine had ever printed.
Source: India Today
