Asian Community News
Asian Community News, known as the ACN Network, is a news media service based in Gurugram, Haryana, that reports on Indo-East Asian affairs. Founded in 2019, it publishes daily online news and a monthly print magazine devoted to India's engagement with East and Southeast Asia — with a special focus on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the member countries of ASEAN. Where general Indian media cover Asia episodically, usually at moments of diplomacy or crisis, ACN was created to cover the relationship continuously: the Japanese factories in Haryana, the Korean cultural wave in Indian cities, the Taiwanese business interest, the students, expatriates, diplomats and entrepreneurs who make up the Asian communities in India, and the Indians building lives and careers in connection with those countries. Its office is in Gurugram, the corporate hub adjoining New Delhi that hosts a large concentration of Japanese and Korean companies, and its reporting is filed from datelines across India and the region.
Founded in 2019 by Sanjeev K Ahuja
ACN was founded in 2019 by Sanjeev K Ahuja, who serves as its Founder, Editor-in-Chief and CEO. Ahuja brought long mainstream-media experience to the venture: he is a media and communication professional with more than 25 years of journalism experience, including a 13-year stint with the Hindustan Times in New Delhi and the National Capital Region, where he held leadership roles including Bureau Chief and Senior Assistant Editor, and five years with the English daily The Pioneer, among other publications. That background shaped ACN's character. It is not a blog or an aggregator but a founder-led newsroom operating in the conventions of Indian broadsheet journalism — correspondents, datelines, interviews and beat categories — aimed at a niche that its founder judged underserved: the dense, everyday traffic of business, culture and community between India and East Asia.
The editorial beat: Indo-East Asian affairs
The network's stated remit is Indo-East Asian affairs, and its site organises coverage around country beats — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and the wider Asian region — alongside sections for news, breaking news, events and interviews. In practice, the Japan and South Korea beats dominate, reflecting the depth of those two relationships with India. Coverage ranges across an unusually wide subject mix for a specialist outlet: industrial investment and state industrial policy, trade fairs and buyer delegations, language education and study-abroad fairs, martial arts and yoga championships, anime festivals and film festivals, K-pop championships and Korean food fairs, Japanese cultural camps and speech contests, diaspora community events, and the doings of chambers of commerce and friendship societies. ACN also publishes interviews — with business leaders, artists, designers and academics — and opinion, giving the platform a magazine-like layer above its daily news file.
Daily online news and a monthly magazine
ACN operates in two formats. The first is its daily online news service at asiancommunitynews.com, which publishes continuously under bylines including ACN Correspondent, individual staff writers and Ahuja himself, who remains a prolific contributor of news reports and interviews. The second is a monthly print news magazine, which extends the same coverage to a physical readership within the Asian business and diplomatic community in India. The combination is deliberate: the website serves the daily rhythm of announcements, events and developments, while the monthly magazine provides the curated, durable record suited to community and corporate readers. Ahuja's personal author archive alone runs to dozens of pages of stories stretching back to the network's first year, 2019 — including early coverage of events such as the Japanese Film Festival of that year and India–Korea defence discussions — which documents the continuity of the operation since its founding.
Covering the East Asian community in India
A defining strand of ACN's work is community journalism for East Asians living in India and for Indians connected to their countries. Its reporting follows Japanese expatriates — numbering in the thousands even through disruptions such as the COVID-19 lockdown period, which ACN covered from the angle of stranded nationals and evacuation flights — Korean families and students, and the institutions that serve them: cultural centres, language institutes, schools programmes and friendship associations. Stories about Korean language learning entering Indian schools, Japanese speech contests, study-in-Japan and study-in-Korea fairs, and cultural festivals in Delhi-NCR, Pune, Chennai, Bengaluru and other cities recur throughout its file. This community focus gives ACN a readership logic different from a general news site: it is a hometown paper, in effect, for a dispersed but identifiable population whose lives cross the India–East Asia boundary.
Business and industry coverage
Alongside community news, ACN functions as a business-news service for the India–East Asia corridor. It reports on Japanese and Korean companies operating in India — their plants, policies, corporate social-responsibility projects and leadership changes — on investment-promotion bodies and chambers such as the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry in India, of which ACN is a member company, and on trade events from the K-Food Fair to international trade shows bringing Japanese and Korean buyers to India. Its interviews and reports capture granular questions that general business media rarely reach: land prices and labour costs shaping Japanese investors' choice of Indian states, state governments designing policies to attract East Asian manufacturing, and sectoral openings from food processing to beauty and wellness. For companies and officials working the corridor, that granularity is the service's value.
Beyond news: training and initiatives
ACN has also stepped beyond publishing into community-facing initiatives. On 13 July 2025, the ACN Network signed a memorandum of understanding with Blu Parrot Ventures to jointly develop "ACN AI for Business Leaders," a training course intended to equip Asian business leaders with skills in data analysis, large-language-model integration, process automation, agentic AI and AI-powered business strategy, with Blu Parrot developing the course content and ACN contributing market expertise and multilingual accessibility for its community. The episode illustrates the network's self-understanding: not merely a chronicler of the India–East Asia business community but a participant in it, using its position at the community's centre to convene programmes its readers need. Its events coverage performs a similar convening function in print and online, publicising and recording the community's calendar of conferences, festivals and forums.
The founder's wider roles
Ahuja's personal standing in media and India–Asia institutions is closely intertwined with the network's. He has served as National Vice-President, and later National Spokesperson, of the Web Journalists Association of India, a self-regulatory body for digital news publishers registered with the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting under the IT Rules of 2021. He is Vice President (Asia) of the Media Federation of India, a member of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of South Asia, a governing board member of the India–Republic of Korea Friendship Society headed by former ambassador Skand R Tayal, and an advisory board member of the Indian Students and Researchers in Korea association and of Konnichiwa Japan Club. In 2026 he was inducted into the Southwest Asia chapter of Korea's Peaceful Unification Advisory Council (PUAC), reported as the first Indian to join that chapter. These roles both reflect and reinforce ACN's niche: its editor is institutionally embedded in the very networks — journalistic, diplomatic and community — that the outlet covers.
Recognition and institutional memberships
The network's institutional footprint includes membership of the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry India and association with the Foreign Correspondents' Club of South Asia, and its coverage is tracked by media-monitoring and journalist databases such as Muck Rack and BuzzSumo, which list Ahuja as a verified journalist and editor for the outlet. ACN stories are regularly datelined from both Indian and Asian locations, and its reporting on subjects from presidential visits to cultural festivals places it within the working information circuit of embassies, cultural centres, chambers and community organisations concerned with India–East Asia relations. For a specialist outlet founded only in 2019, that degree of institutional integration is a measure of how thoroughly it has occupied its niche.
Place in India's media landscape
India has few dedicated news services for its relationships with East and Southeast Asia, despite the region's growing weight in Indian trade, manufacturing, education and popular culture. National newspapers maintain foreign bureaus and business desks that touch these stories, but the continuous, community-level record — the school programme, the chamber appointment, the factory's school project, the festival — is largely kept by ACN. Headquartered in Gurugram, publishing daily online and monthly in print, and focused on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and ASEAN, Asian Community News has become the specialist chronicler of that connection. In a directory of Indian news agencies and media services, it represents the modern niche network: small in staff terms, deep in subject, and built around a founder whose career and institutional life are woven into the beat the outlet exists to cover.
