Delhi Tak
Delhi Tak is a Hindi-language digital news portal and video channel devoted entirely to Delhi, published at delhitak.in as part of the India Today Group's Tak network of mobile-first news channels. On its video platforms it brands itself Dilli Tak — the city's own name for itself — and it promises viewers a completely new style of news about the capital: very short, fiery videos, uncut exclusive interviews, crime reporting, civic utility news, weather, traffic and the everyday life of the metropolis. Its slogan captures the proposition in a single line: your city, brought to you — this is Dilli Tak. In a national media landscape where Delhi is usually covered as the seat of the Union government, Delhi Tak is the rare outlet that covers Delhi as a city, for the people who live in it.
Inside the Tak network
Delhi Tak belongs to the Tak family of digital channels run by the India Today Group, the media conglomerate behind Aaj Tak, India Today and The Lallantop. The Tak network was the group's answer to mobile-first news consumption: a portfolio of specialist channels — national, subject-based and regional — built for YouTube, social platforms and the group's own Tak app, rather than for a television schedule. When the group refreshed the Tak app in December 2021, the portfolio comprised eighteen channels, including News Tak, Sports Tak, Crime Tak, Bharat Tak, Biz Tak, UP Tak, Bihar Tak, MP Tak, Rajasthan Tak, Gujarat Tak, Mumbai Tak, Punjab Tak, Haryana Tak and Dilli Tak, together commanding more than 44 million subscribers and roughly nine billion views a year across social platforms.
Delhi Tak is the network's capital-city channel. Its regional siblings each own a state; Delhi Tak owns a metropolis — but a metropolis unlike any other in India, one that is simultaneously a city of more than thirty million people in its wider region, a Union Territory with its own elected government, and the seat of the national government. That triple identity shapes everything the channel does.
A different idea of Delhi news
The channel's own account of Delhi explains its editorial mission. Delhi, it says, holds a mirror to India's past, present and future: narrow bylanes and Mughal-era heritage buildings recall a glorious past, in sharp contrast to the glamour and pace of a modern metropolis, and the peaceful coexistence of those contradictions gives Delhi its special place in the country. Delhi decides national politics, the channel notes, but it has its own identity and ideology; it is a city of big-hearted people that embraces every culture and language as people from every corner of the world make it their home.
That framing is the channel's founding argument: Delhi deserves to be covered as a lived city, not only as a dateline for national power. Its promise to viewers is that to live, breathe and feel Delhi, there is one destination — a channel that understands the pulse of the metro. The coverage that follows from it is intensely local: neighbourhoods, municipal services, local politics and Delhi's people, reported in Hindi for the city's Hindi-speaking majority.
The forty-second format and the shortest bulletin
Delhi Tak's signature is speed of a particular kind. Its YouTube channel description leads with its short, fiery videos of around forty seconds — quick, punchy reports designed for phone viewing and sharing. Alongside them sits a format the channel calls Delhi's Top-10 News, which it bills as the world's shortest Delhi bulletin: the city's ten essential stories compressed into a single rapid update. These formats place Delhi Tak inside the Tak network's wider short-form strategy, whose Tak app "Fatak" feature delivers news updates in thirty-second videos, supported by curated top-five home feeds, related-video recommendations and the ability to run as many as ten live streams at once.
Short, however, does not mean shallow in the channel's design. The same channel description promises interesting and exclusive interviews, presented uncut — long-form conversations published in full rather than clipped for television. The pairing is deliberate: forty-second videos for the day's heat, uncut interviews for its substance, and live streams when events in the capital demand continuous coverage.
Crime Capital: the crime beat
Crime is a named franchise within Delhi Tak's output: its channel description lists crime news under the strand it calls Crime Capital. Delhi's crime story — from street crime in its colonies to major cases investigated by the Delhi Police and national agencies — is a staple of the capital's news diet, and Delhi Tak treats it as a beat of its own rather than an occasional segment. Its reporting follows cases from first information to court and consequence; its coverage of a murder case in the Amar Colony area, for example, pursued the accused's family background and the online-gaming addiction his relatives described, the kind of follow-through reporting that distinguishes a city channel from a national bulletin that moves on.
The crime beat connects directly to the channel's civic mission. Safety, policing and law and order are among the most contested questions in Delhi's public life, fought over between the elected Delhi government and the Union government, which controls the Delhi Police. A channel dedicated to the city cannot avoid that argument, and Delhi Tak's crime coverage sits at the centre of it.
Politics: the city and the centre
Delhi politics, in Delhi Tak's coverage, operates on two levels at once. The first is the city's own politics: the Delhi government, the municipal corporation, and the long-running contest between the Aam Aadmi Party, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress for the capital's votes. The second is national politics conducted from Delhi — Parliament, the central government and the national parties — which the channel covers from the vantage point of the city that hosts them. Its output moves between the two constantly, from ground reports on civic protests to sharp political exchanges involving national figures, always with Delhi as the stage.
Because Delhi decides so much of national politics while remaining a city with flooded underpasses and water shortages, the channel's dual focus is its defining editorial feature. Its stories treat national leaders as local actors and local grievances as national news, which is precisely how politics is experienced by the people who live in the capital.
Useful Delhi: civic news, weather and traffic
A distinctive share of Delhi Tak's output is what it calls news of use — videos that will be useful to viewers in their daily lives. Its channel description lists, among its regular elements, weather and traffic coverage and a segment devoted to the city's agenda, alongside practical reporting on the services Delhi runs on. When a pipeline burst at the Chandrawal water treatment plant disrupted supply across large parts of the city, for instance, the channel's report named the affected areas — Civil Lines, Vasant Vihar, R. K. Puram, Karol Bagh, Patel Nagar, the NDMC area and more — listed the hospitals affected and carried the Delhi Jal Board's emergency helpline number, turning a news story into a public-service announcement for the neighbourhoods involved.
This utility layer is completed by lighter strands the channel lists in its own line-up: a shopping guide to the city's markets, a "postmortem" segment that dissects the day's Delhi news, public conversations in its people's-voices format, and profiles of the faces of Delhi. Together they give the channel the texture of a city magazine as well as a news service — a mixture pitched at residents, not at the national audience passing through.
Digital presence
Delhi Tak is digital-native. Its text and video home is delhitak.in, and its video channel on YouTube operates as Dilli Tak, with an accompanying presence on Facebook, where it publishes as the official Dilli Tak page, and on Twitter as DilliTak. Its videos point viewers to the Tak app, where the channel is available alongside the rest of the India Today Group's Tak portfolio, and its stories are tagged in the vocabulary of its beat: Delhi News, Delhi Politics, Breaking News, Hindi News, Ground Report.
The channel's distribution follows the Tak network's model: social platforms as the engine of discovery, where its short videos travel, and the group's own app and website as the destination for loyal viewers, with personalisation, live streams and anchor-led sections that social feeds cannot offer. Group executives framed that model, when the refreshed app launched, as building a destination for a fan base the channels had already gathered — more than 44 million subscribers across the network at that time.
Audience and significance
Delhi Tak's audience is Delhi itself: Hindi-speaking residents of the capital's colonies, markets and suburbs, commuters who need traffic and weather before they need analysis, and the vast population of migrants for whom Delhi is both workplace and adopted home — the big-hearted city of the channel's own description. For that audience, the channel supplies something the capital's many national newsrooms do not: a running order in which Delhi's water, roads, crime and municipal politics outrank everything else.
Within India's digital news landscape, Delhi Tak is a telling example of the regionalisation of big media. The India Today Group could have covered Delhi from its national channels indefinitely; instead it built a dedicated, Hindi, video-first city channel with its own formats — the forty-second report, the Top-10 bulletin, Crime Capital — and its own voice. Delhi Tak's bet is that the world's news capitals are also hometowns, and that the hometown audience, served properly, is loyal. Its continuing output of ground reports, uncut interviews and useful city news is that bet being placed, every day, on the pulse of the metro.
