CNBC Bajar

About CNBC Bajar

Overview

CNBC Bajar is a Gujarati-language business news television channel owned by the Network18 Group, based in Ahmedabad. Launched on 1 July 2014, it was billed at its debut as India's first Gujarati business channel, extending the CNBC brand — already established in India through the English-language CNBC-TV18 and the Hindi-language CNBC Awaaz — into a third language. Its tagline, "Business Ni Matrubhasha" ("the mother tongue of business"), captures its proposition: market news, personal finance and business programming for the Gujarati-speaking community, widely regarded as India's most business-minded linguistic group.

The channel is part of India's only dedicated business news network, backed by the editorial might of the CNBC universe in India. It covers live market action from the NSE and BSE, commodities and currency, alongside feature programming on personal finance, entrepreneurship, small and medium enterprises, bullion, property and lifestyle — all in Gujarati. For a community whose identity is intertwined with trade and enterprise, from the diamond merchants of Surat to the stockbrokers of Ahmedabad, the channel speaks the language of business in the language of home.

The announcement

Network18 announced its plan to launch a Gujarati business channel in January 2014, as part of a wider return to expansion after the difficult year of 2013, when the news industry — and the network — had undergone rationalisation and layoffs. Network18 group CEO B. Sai Kumar confirmed the plan: a Gujarati business news channel called CNBC Bazaar (as it was initially styled), alongside a new online business venture. The announcement signalled that the network saw Gujarat's business community as an underserved television audience worth a dedicated channel.

The timing was deliberate. The network was already in the middle of its landmark 2014 regional expansion — new ETV news channels for Bengal, Karnataka, Haryana/Himachal, Gujarat and Odisha — and the Gujarati business channel was conceived as the financial complement to the general news channel ETV News Gujarati, launched three weeks earlier on 21 June 2014. Together, the two launches gave Network18 an unprecedented Gujarati-language television footprint: news and business, side by side.

Launch on 1 July 2014

CNBC Bajar was launched on 1 July 2014, ten days after its general-news sibling. The launch was a high-profile affair: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, himself a Gujarati, sent a message for the occasion, telling the network that it had understood the mindset and lifeline of Gujarat and expressing his belief that the Gujarati channel would earn the network its highest profits. The prime ministerial endorsement — reported widely in the trade press — gave the launch a national resonance beyond the business-news niche.

The channel went on air as the third business news channel in the CNBC India portfolio, after CNBC-TV18 (English, launched 1999) and CNBC Awaaz (Hindi, launched 2005). It was launched in partnership with Infibeam.com, the Ahmedabad-based e-commerce company, and in association with the Adani group and Ganesh Housing — launch partners drawn from Gujarat's own corporate landscape, a fitting sponsorship lineup for a channel dedicated to the state's business community.

The tagline and positioning

"Business Ni Matrubhasha" — the mother tongue of business — was more than a slogan; it was the channel's entire editorial thesis. As CNBC channels and Forbes India CEO Anil Uniyal put it at the launch, Gujaratis were top performers on every economic parameter, from industrialisation to GDP per household, yet little content was being created to serve this affluent audience in its own language. No other community, he argued, devoured content around finance, markets, business and economics the way Gujaratis did.

The tagline also carried a cultural claim that Narendra Modi himself endorsed in his launch message: that Gujarati is, in a real sense, the language of business — accepted across the world as a medium of trade, from the diamond markets where foreign buyers learn Gujarati to deal with Saurashtrian merchants, to the trading floors where Gujarati remains the working language. The channel positioned itself as the television embodiment of that idea: business news not translated into Gujarati, but thought in Gujarati from the start.

Programming: markets and beyond

The channel's core offering is live market coverage: trading action from the National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange, commodities, and currency markets, presented through the trading day in Gujarati. Around this spine, the channel built feature programming on personal finance, entrepreneurship, small and medium enterprises, retail, bullion and commodities, property, and lifestyle — subjects chosen to match the interests of its audience.

Editor-in-chief Sanjay Pugalia, one of Indian television's most experienced business journalists, shaped the channel's editorial mix. As he explained at the launch, the channel added stronger doses of content around SMEs, retail, bullion and commodities to the typical business-news mix, and it focused both on the micro-markets within Gujarat and on the global markets that affect the investment decisions of business-savvy Gujaratis. Anchor Pradeep Pandya was among the faces of the channel, and actor Aashka Goradia was roped in as the channel's public face for its launch campaign.

The launch campaign

The channel's launch was backed by a major marketing push. Around Rs 4 crore was spent on a month-long promotion campaign created by the advertising agency O&M around the "mother tongue of business" theme, spanning television, print, outdoor, online, mobile, on-ground activations and railway stations. More than 120 outdoor sites were booked across Gujarat and 30 in Mumbai, handled by the media agency Madison, and Big FM radio was used in Surat, Baroda (Vadodara) and Rajkot.

The campaign ran across the Network18 group's own channels — including Colors, MTV, the CNBC channels, the IBN channels, ETV Gujarati, ETV Rajasthan, ETV MP, History, MTV Indies, Comedy Central and VH1 — and in print across publications including Mint, Sandesh, Gujarat Samachar and Forbes India. The scale of the campaign reflected the network's conviction that the channel could define a new category: business television in a regional language.

Early performance

The channel's early months suggested the bet was paying off. In TV18's investor update for the fourth quarter of FY15 — covering the channel's first full quarters on air — the network reported that CNBC Bajar had launched to strong positive sentiment from the Gujarati business community, and that its viewership had increased by 193 per cent in Q4 FY15 over its launch quarter of Q2 FY15. For a niche-language business channel, that growth trajectory was a vindication of the category.

The channel benefited from the credibility of the CNBC brand in India — CNBC-TV18 was the undisputed leader in English business news with a 58 per cent market share in the same quarter, and CNBC Awaaz dominated Hindi business news with over 60 per cent — and from the absence of direct competition: no other Gujarati business channel existed, and the channel claimed the first-mover position in the market.

The Gujarati business audience

The channel's audience is among the most distinctive in Indian television. Gujaratis are disproportionately represented in Indian business — in trading, manufacturing, diamonds, textiles, pharmaceuticals and finance — and the community's relationship with markets is cultural as well as economic. The channel's viewers include the small traders of Ahmedabad's old city, the diamond merchants of Surat, the industrialists of Vadodara and Bharuch, and the vast Gujarati diaspora in the UK, US, Canada and East Africa, for whom the channel is a link to the homeland's economic life.

This audience's financial sophistication shapes the channel's journalism. Its viewers do not need markets explained from first principles; they need timely, accurate information on the stocks, commodities and currencies they trade, and analysis of the policies — from Union Budgets to RBI decisions to state industrial policy — that affect their businesses. The channel's Gujarati-language presentation makes this information accessible to the older generation of traders who think in Gujarati, as well as to younger viewers entering family businesses.

The CNBC family and Network18

CNBC Bajar sits within the CNBC India portfolio alongside CNBC-TV18 and CNBC Awaaz, drawing on the shared editorial resources, market data infrastructure and journalistic talent of India's leading business news operation. The three channels together cover India's business story in English, Hindi and Gujarati — a linguistic span no other business news organisation in the country can match.

The channel is part of the Network18 Group, controlled by Reliance Industries, whose portfolio spans news, entertainment and digital media. Within the group, CNBC Bajar complements the Gujarati general-news channel News18 Gujarati: one for the news of the day, the other for the markets and money. Together they anchor the group's Gujarati-language television presence, an investment that reflects Gujarat's weight in both Indian politics and the Indian economy.

How to watch

CNBC Bajar is available on cable and direct-to-home platforms across Gujarat and to Gujarati-speaking viewers nationally. The channel's business coverage can also be followed through the Network18 digital platforms, including cnbctv18.com. More information is available at the official website, cnbctv18.com.