Hansa Research
Overview
Hansa Research is a full-service market research and consumer insights company headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, and part of the R K Swamy Hansa Group. For the Indian news and advertising industries, its best-known role has been as a measurement firm: for years it conducted the Indian Readership Survey, the large national study whose figures helped newspapers, magazines, advertisers and media agencies judge the reach of print publications. Beyond readership measurement, the company carries out custom and syndicated research for brands across sectors, covering consumers, brands, customer experience and communications.
The firm describes its work in terms of data integrity and decision support rather than raw data alone. Its studies are used to build brand strategies, track how customers experience a product or service, test advertising, and understand how people actually consume media. Because the same company has worked both on media measurement and on consumer and product research, its findings have often linked the two sides of the market: who reads, watches and listens, and what those same households buy and own.
History and Founding
Hansa Research was set up in 1983. That date places its origins in a period when organised market research in India was still a relatively small, specialist business serving a limited number of large advertisers and publishers. Over the following decades the industry expanded with economic liberalisation, the growth of private television, the spread of consumer brands into smaller towns, and the rise of digital media, and Hansa grew with it.
A central figure in that story was Ashok Kumar Das. Industry obituaries published after his death in June 2026 described him as the founder of Hansa Research and as an architect of India's market research industry, with a career spanning nearly four decades. Das began his career at Exide Industries in 1978 after graduating from IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta, and he held senior roles at other research organisations, including IMRB International and MARG, before taking charge of the Hansa Research Group in 2002 and reshaping it into one of the country's leading consumer insights firms. He was also a former president of the Market Research Society of India and gave guest lectures at institutions including IIM Ahmedabad and IIT Bombay. Hansa's chief executive Praveen Nijhara, paying tribute in 2026, credited Das with building a culture rooted in integrity and curiosity.
The Indian Readership Survey Years
Hansa's most consequential assignment for the news industry was the Indian Readership Survey, known as the IRS. The survey is owned and administered by the Media Research Users Council, an industry body set up in 1994. Hansa conducted the IRS on behalf of the MRUC from 2003, and in 2009 it won the contract for a third consecutive term, covering 2010 to 2012, which made it the longest-serving agency on the survey at that point.
The scale of the exercise explains why it mattered so much. The IRS was described as one of the world's largest continuous surveys, with an annual sample exceeding 250,000 household interviews. From a single set of households it collected detailed print readership information alongside television and cinema viewing, radio listening and internet usage, as well as data on product usage, consumption and durable ownership. Because media habits and product data came from the same respondents, advertisers could connect a newspaper's readership profile directly to the purchasing profile of its audience. The survey had more than 125 subscribers, including advertisers, media houses and advertising agencies. Hansa was credited with introducing innovations into the study, including the Household Potential Index for profiling consumers, a local area profiling tool, and improved sampling techniques. In 2012 Hansa signed a memorandum of understanding with Ipsos to bid jointly for the next IRS contract, combining its Indian readership experience with Ipsos research conducted in dozens of countries; the industry's Readership Studies Council of India ultimately moved the unified survey to another provider.
Services and Research Products
Alongside large industry studies, Hansa runs custom research for individual clients and a set of recurring syndicated products. Its customer experience work is exemplified by Insurance CuES, a syndicated study of life insurance customers. The 2026 edition, the sixth, drew on feedback from more than 3,500 customers across 12 life insurance brands, tracking experience, perception and behaviour and ranking insurers, partly through Net Promoter Score measures. The 2023 edition had similarly ranked providers and examined barriers to buying life cover, from affordability to perceived difficulty of purchase.
Another recurring product is the Brand Endorser Report, which ranks film, sports and other celebrities as advertising endorsers; its published editions attracted wide coverage in the marketing press, with sports figures such as Sachin Tendulkar prominent in the 2022 findings. The company has also offered communication measurement services, launched in partnership with the United States firm MSW-ARS in 2017, combining neuro and biometric measures with cognitive measures to test advertising from idea stage to execution and to assess return on marketing investment. In 2022 it partnered with the experience-management platform Qualtrics, combining its consulting work with that platform so clients could track brand health and competitor standing in closer to real time, by audience segment, using structured and unstructured feedback.
How Newsrooms, Publishers and Advertisers Use It
For publishers, readership measurement of the kind Hansa produced for the IRS was a commercial currency. A newspaper or magazine used its readership figures to demonstrate the size and profile of its audience to advertisers and agencies, to defend advertising rates, and to decide where to invest in circulation and editions. Agencies and advertisers, in turn, used the same data to allocate print budgets between titles and markets on a comparable basis.
For the wider marketing industry, Hansa's brand, customer experience and endorser studies serve a planning function: they show which brands customers would recommend, where service experience is weakening advocacy, and which public figures carry credibility for a campaign. News organisations covering the advertising and media business routinely report Hansa's published rankings and survey findings, which is one route by which its research enters public debate about consumer behaviour in India, from insurance buying to festive-season shopping and celebrity endorsement.
Headquarters and Footprint in India
Hansa's head office is in Mumbai, and it has served clients from research offices in Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. Its field operation has historically been much wider than its office network: reporting on the company has described more than two million consumer interviews a year, carried out through an extensive field infrastructure with 22 field offices across India. That interview network is what made a household survey on the IRS scale feasible, reaching urban and rural respondents across states and language markets.
The company also operates beyond India. Company profiles describe Hansa Research as conducting research in over 100 countries, with offices in the United States, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Bangladesh, and clients across the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. It reports certification under ISO 9001, ISO 27001 and ISO 20252 standards covering quality, information security and market research practice.
Digital Panels and Newer Methods
As interviewing moved online, Hansa built a proprietary digital panel called Hansa Cheetah. It is a web and mobile-based, all-India panel whose members register with verified contact and profile details and take part in surveys for clients. Industry coverage described it as one of India's larger app-based consumer panels, with over 50,000 research participants across tier-one and tier-two towns at the time of reporting, growing as new respondents were added daily. The appeal of such a panel is speed and cost: profiled respondents can be reached quickly for studies of purchase behaviour, service experience, lifestyle and media consumption.
The company's published descriptions also point to online focus groups and in-depth interviews, webcam and mobile-camera recording, and micro-targeting through social media to find respondents with specific traits. Together with the Qualtrics partnership, these tools mark a shift from a business once defined by very large face-to-face household surveys towards a mix of field, panel and platform-based research, while the large syndicated studies continue in areas such as insurance customer experience.
Ownership and Leadership
Hansa Research is part of the R K Swamy Hansa Group, the group whose name it shares with the R K Swamy advertising business. Ashok Das led the research group for many years as managing director, and later remained associated with the organisation, most recently in a senior advisory capacity, and as a non-executive director before the company's sale to the Swamy brothers, according to obituary reporting in 2026. Praveen Nijhara has served as chief executive officer, representing the company publicly in announcements including the Qualtrics collaboration in 2022 and in tributes to Das in 2026.
Readers should note that leadership titles in a research group of this kind cover both the syndicated-study business and the custom consulting business, and Hansa executives frequently appear as spokespeople for its published studies, explaining methodology and findings to the trade press. That public role matters because the credibility of a measurement firm rests heavily on the perceived independence and integrity of the people running it, a theme that recurred in the industry tributes to Das.
Role in the Indian News Ecosystem
Hansa's place in the news ecosystem is indirect but structural. It does not publish news; it supplies some of the numbers by which news media are bought, sold and judged. Readership data shaped how print publishers positioned themselves and how agencies divided spending between print, television, radio and digital. Its innovations in household and local-area profiling also influenced how the industry described audiences geographically and economically.
Das was additionally associated with initiatives beyond the IRS, including the Rural Socio-Economic Classification used to profile rural consumers and support for INTAM, an early television meter service. Those contributions illustrate how a handful of measurement specialists helped build the shared vocabulary — readership, socio-economic classification, audience ratings — on which Indian media planning still depends.
Notable Facts and Developments
Several facts summarise Hansa's standing. It was set up in 1983 and grew into a full-service agency working across sectors. It conducted the IRS from 2003 and won that contract three times in a row, becoming its longest-serving agency of that era. It has reported conducting over two million interviews a year through its field network. Its syndicated products, including Insurance CuES and the Brand Endorser Report, continue to be published and cited, with the sixth Life Insurance CuES edition appearing in 2026. The death of Ashok Kumar Das in June 2026 prompted extensive tributes from advertising and research leaders, underlining how closely the firm's identity was tied to his reputation for integrity.
The broader context is a measurement business in transition. The IRS itself went through long gaps after 2019, with the MRUC working on reviving the survey amid debate over methodology and cost-sharing, so Hansa's historic IRS role is best understood as belonging to the survey's earlier, regular quarterly and half-yearly era, while the company's current public profile rests more on brand, customer experience and digital panel research.
How to Access and Use Hansa Research
Businesses engage Hansa as a commissioned research provider: a client typically approaches the company through its website, hansaresearch.com, for a custom study, a syndicated report or panel-based fieldwork, and the research is delivered as proprietary findings for that client or, for syndicated products, to subscribers. Published headline findings from studies such as Insurance CuES and the Brand Endorser Report are available through trade-press coverage, which is how journalists and smaller firms most often encounter its numbers.
Individual consumers encounter Hansa differently, as respondents. People can register free of charge with the Hansa Cheetah panel through its website, providing basic profile details, and are then invited by email or message to surveys for which they qualify. For media professionals, the practical takeaway is attribution: figures credited to Hansa Research should be read as survey estimates produced to a stated sample and method, whether a national household study of a quarter of a million interviews or a focused customer study of a few thousand respondents in a single sector.
