TOI 

on a 1988 stamp

TOI on a 2013 stamp

Following the Vivian Bose Commission report indicating serious wrongdoings of the Dalmia–Jain
group, on 28 August 1969, the Bombay High Court, under Justice J. L. Nain, passed an interim
order to disband the existing board of Bennett, Coleman & Co and to constitute a new board
under the Government. The bench ruled that "Under these circumstances, the best thing would
be to pass such orders on the assumption that the allegations made by the petitioners that the
affairs of the company were being conducted in a manner prejudicial to public interest and to the
interests of the Company are correct".[12] Following that order, Shanti Prasad Jain ceased to be a
director and the company ran with new directors on board, appointed by the Government of
India, with the exception of a lone stenographer of the Jains. Curiously, the court appointed D K
Kunte as chairman of the board. Kunte had no prior business experience and was also an
opposition member of the Lok Sabha.

Back to the Jain family[edit]

In 1976, during the Emergency in India, the Government transferred ownership of the newspaper
back to Ashok Kumar Jain, who was Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain's son and Ramkrishna Dalmia's
grandson. He is the father of the current owners Samir Jain and Vineet Jain).[28] The Jains too
often landed themselves in various money laundering scams and Ashok Kumar Jain had to flee
the country when the Enforcement Directorate pursued his case strongly in 1998 for alleged
violations of illegal transfer of funds (to the tune of US$1.25 million) to an overseas account
in Switzerland.[29][30][31][32]

During the Emergency[edit]

On 26 June 1975, the day after India declared a state of emergency, the Bombay edition
of TOI carried an entry in its obituary column that read "D.E.M. O'Cracy, beloved husband of
T.Ruth, father of L.I.Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope and Justice expired on 25 June".[33] The move
was a critique of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's 21-month state of emergency, which is now
widely known as "the Emergency" and seen by many as a roundly authoritarian era of Indian
government.[34][35]

The Times in the 21st century[edit]

In late 2006, Times Group acquired Vijayanand Printers Limited (VPL). VPL previously published
two Kannada newspapers, Vijay Karnataka and Usha Kiran, and an English daily, Vijay
Times. Vijay Karnataka was the leader in the Kannada newspaper segment then.[36]
The paper launched a Chennai edition, 12 April 2008.[37] It launched a Kolhapur edition, February
2013.

TOIFA Awards[edit]
Introduced in 2013[38] and awarded for the second time in 2016,[39] "The Times of India Film
Awards" or the "TOIFA" is an award for the work in Film Industry decided by a global public vote
on the nomination categories.[40]

Editions and publications [edit]

TOI's first office is opposite the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai where it was founded.[20]

TOI is published by the media group Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. The company, along with its
other group of companies, known as The Times Group, also publishes Ahmedabad
Mirror, Bangalore Mirror, Mumbai Mirror, Pune Mirror; Economic Times; ET
Panache (Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore on Monday to Friday) and ET
Panache (Pune and Chennai on every Saturday); Ei Samay Sangbadpatra,
(a Bengali daily); Maharashtra Times, (a Marathi daily); Navbharat Times, (a Hindi daily).
TOI has its editions in major cities such as Mumbai,
[41]
 Agra, Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Aurangabad, Bareilly, Bangalore, Belgaum, Bhopal, Bhubanes
war, Coimbatore, Chandigarh, Chennai, Dehradun, Delhi, Gorakhpur, Gurgaon, Guwahati, Gwali
or, Hubli, Hyderabad, Indore, Jabalpur, Jaipur, Jammu, Kanpur, Kochi, Kolhapur, Kolkata, Luckn
ow, Ludhiana, Madurai, Malabar, Mangalore, Meerut, Mysore, Nagpur, Nashik, Navi
Mumbai, Noida, Panaji, Patna, Pondicherry, Pune, Raipur, Rajkot, Ranchi, Shimla, Surat, Thane, 
Tiruchirapally, Trivandrum, Vadodara, Varanasi, Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam.[citation needed]

Times Group Network[edit]

 Speaking Tree: A spiritual network intended to allow spiritual seekers to link spiritual seekers
with established practitioners.[42]
 Healthmeup: A health, diet, and fitness website.[43]
 Cricbuzz: In November 2014, Times Internet acquired Cricbuzz, a website focused
on cricket news.[44]

Criticism and controversies[edit]

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Paid news[edit]
Main article: Paid news in India
TOI has been criticised for being the first to institutionalise the practice of paid news in India,
where politicians, businessmen, corporations and celebrities can pay the newspaper and its
journalists would carry the desired news for the payer.[5][45][46] The newspaper offers prominence
with which the paid news is placed and the page on which it is displayed based on the amount of
the payment. According to this practice, a payment plan assures a news feature and ensures
positive coverage to the payer.[5] In 2005, TOI began the practice of "private treaties", also called
as "brand capital", where new companies, individuals or movies seeking mass coverage and
public relations, major brands and organisations were offered sustained positive coverage and
plugs in its news columns in exchange for shares or other forms of financial obligations
to Bennett, Coleman & Company, Ltd. (B.C.C.L.) – the owners of TOI.[5][45] The B.C.C.L., with its
"private treaties" program, acquired stakes in 350 companies and generated 15% of its revenues
by 2012, according to a critical article in The New Yorker. The "paid news" and "private treaties"
practice started by TOI has since been adopted by The Hindustan Times group, the India
Today group, the Outlook group, and other major media groups in India including Indian
television channels.[5][47] This division of the company was later renamed Brand Capital and has
contracts in place with many companies in diverse sectors.
The "paid news" and "private treaties" blur the lines between content and advertising, with the
favourable coverage written by the staff reporters on the payroll of TOI.[5] The newspaper has
defended its practice in 2012 by stating that it includes a note of disclosure to the reader –
though in a small font – that its contents are "advertorial, entertainment promotional feature", that
they are doing this to generate revenues just like "all newspapers in the world do advertorials"
according to TOI owners.[5][45] According to Maya Ranganathan, this overlap in the function of a
journalist to also act as a marketing and advertisement revenue seeker for the newspaper raises
conflict of interest questions, a problem that has morphed into ever-larger scale in India and
recognised by India's SEBI authority in July 2009.[45]
Under an ad sales initiative called Medianet, if a large company or Bollywood studio sponsored a
news-worthy event, the event would be covered by TOI but the name of the company or studio
that sponsored it will not be mentioned in the paper unless they paid TOI for advertising. In 2010,
a report by a subcommittee of India's Press Council found that Medianet's paid news strategy
had spread to a large number of newspapers and more than five hundred television channels.[5][48]
Critics state that the company's paid news and private treaties skew its coverage and shield its
newspaper advertisers from scrutiny. The Hoot, a media criticism website, has pointed out that
when a lift in a 19-storey luxury apartment complex in Bangalore crashed killing two workers and
injuring seven, all the English language and Kannada language newspapers with the exception
of TOI called out the name of the construction company, Sobha Developers, which was a private-
treaty partner. An article titled "reaping gold through bt cotton," which first appeared in the
Nagpur edition of TOI in 2008, reappeared unchanged in 2011, this time with a small print alert
that the article was a "marketing feature". In both cases, the article was factually incorrect and
made false claims about the success of Monsanto's genetically modified cotton. According to a
critical article published in the Indian investigative news magazine The Caravan, when
the Honda Motors plant in Gurgaon experienced an eight-month-long conflict between
management and non-unionised workers over wages and work conditions in 2005, the Times of
India covered the concerns of Honda and the harm done to India's investment climate and
largely ignored the issues raised by workers.[5]
Vineet Jain, managing director of B.C.C.L., has insisted that a wall does exist between sales and
the newsroom, and that the paper does not give favorable coverage to the company's business
partners. "Our editors don’t know who we have," Jain said, although he later acknowledged that
all private-treaty clients are listed on the company's Web site.[5] Ravindra Dhariwal, the former
CEO of B.C.C.L. had defended private treaties in a 2010 interview with the
magazine Outlook and claims that the partners in the private treaties sign contracts where they
agree to clauses that they will not receive any favourable editorial coverage.

Anti-competitive behavior[edit]
There have been claims that TOI would strike deals with advertisers only if they removed their
advertisements from other competitor newspapers.[5]
TOI is also embroiled in an active lawsuit against the Financial Times. In 1993, when
the Financial Times was preparing to enter the Indian market, Samir Jain, the vice-chairman of
B.C.C.L., registered the term "Financial Times" as a trademark of his company and declared it
his intellectual property in an attempt to stymie the Financial Times and prevent them from
competing with The Economic Times, which is owned by B.C.C.L.[5]
In 1994, when the Hindustan Times was the top-selling paper in New Delhi, TOI slashed their
prices by a third, to one and a half rupees after having built up their ads sales force in
preparation for the price drop to make up for the lost circulation revenue. By 1998, the Hindustan
Times had dropped to second place in Delhi. TOI took a similar strategy in Bangalore where they
dropped the price to one rupee despite protests from Siddharth Varadarajan, one of the editors
of the newspaper at the time, who called the strategy "predatory pricing".[5]