MP Tak

About MP Tak

MP Tak is the Madhya Pradesh-focused digital news platform of the India Today Group, operating primarily in Hindi across video-first social channels and its own dedicated website. Launched as part of the group's "Tak" family of digital-first channels, it covers state politics, administration, crime, sports, entertainment and hyper-local stories from Madhya Pradesh, positioning itself as a regional news brand built natively for mobile and online consumption.

Origins and the Tak Network

MP Tak emerged from the India Today Group's long-running experiment with digital-first news brands under the "Tak" umbrella. The group began building niche digital channels around 2017 with the launch of seven video-centric channels under MobileTak.in, including News Tak, Sports Tak, Food Tak, Life Tak, Astro Tak, Tech Tak and Yoga Tak, targeting audiences who were moving away from appointment television toward mobile video.

The Tak family subsequently expanded into a bouquet of 18 channels spanning national news, sports, business, crime, lifestyle and regional feeds — among them UP Tak, Bihar Tak, Mumbai Tak, Dilli Tak, Rajasthan Tak, Gujarat Tak, Punjab Tak, Haryana Tak and MP Tak. MP Tak was the regional arm dedicated to Madhya Pradesh, first building its audience on YouTube and Facebook before receiving a standalone website of its own.

On its YouTube channel, MP Tak describes itself in Hindi as the "heartbeat of Madhya Pradesh" (MPतक मतलब मध्य प्रदेश की धड़कन), promising coverage of politics, politicians, social, economic and geographic matters, and calling itself the "search engine" for the state. The channel also covers neighbouring Chhattisgarh, reflecting the shared news interests of the two states that were one until the year 2000.

Website Launch in 2023

MP Tak got its own website, www.mptak.in, on February 3, 2023. The site was inaugurated by the then Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, giving the launch significant visibility within the state. The website was built to carry news articles, videos and web stories focused on local and hyper-local news from across Madhya Pradesh.

At the launch, Milind Khandekar, Managing Editor of the Tak Channels, said MP Tak had already been one of the most watched video news platforms in Madhya Pradesh, and described the website as a way to cover the state in a focused manner with unbiased reporting, extending beyond local news into the hyper-local. Vivek Gaur, CEO of Tak Channels and The Lallantop, noted that between April and December 2022 MP Tak had crossed 200 million-plus video views on YouTube and Facebook, making Madhya Pradesh the group's fourth regional market to receive its own digital destination.

Editorial Leadership

The Tak channels are led by Milind Khandekar as Managing Editor, who has been the public editorial face of the regional Tak brands, and Vivek Gaur as CEO of Tak Channels and The Lallantop. Gaur has spoken about the group's pivot from aggregating audiences on social platforms to building owned destinations, with the MP Tak website launch described as part of an effort to deepen connections with viewers and reinforce their trust.

Editorially, MP Tak operates within the newsroom culture of the India Today Group, one of India's largest media houses, whose portfolio includes Aaj Tak, India Today television, India Today magazine and The Lallantop. The digital-first Tak channels were designed from the start to be "natively digital" rather than television spin-offs, with short-form video and mobile-first formats at their core.

Coverage Focus: Madhya Pradesh

MP Tak's reporting centres on Madhya Pradesh — a state of over 72 million people, India third-largest by area and sixth-largest by population. Its coverage tracks the state government and assembly politics in Bhopal, the bureaucracy, policing and crime, education and employment news, weather and agriculture, and the cultural life of cities such as Indore, Gwalior, Jabalpur and Ujjain.

The platform publishes in Hindi, the state's official language, and has a strong emphasis on breaking state news, explainer-style videos, ground reports from districts and interviews with political leaders. Its coverage of Chhattisgarh gives it a secondary footprint in the neighbouring state carved out of Madhya Pradesh in 2000.

Digital Strategy: Video-First, Mobile-Native

From the outset, MP Tak was conceived for audiences who consume news on phones rather than televisions. The Tak channels pioneered short news-video formats, including a "Fatak" feature delivering updates in 30 seconds, multiple concurrent live streams, curated top-five videos driven by editorial preference and consumption algorithms, and anchor-focused "spotlight" sections that let viewers follow content from their favourite anchors.

The 2023 website launch extended that strategy to owned web real estate, adding text articles and web stories alongside video — a recognition that search and direct traffic matter for a regional brand that had grown almost entirely through YouTube and Facebook distribution.

MP Tak Baithak: Flagship Event

MP Tak has extended its brand into on-ground events, notably its flagship "MP Tak Baithak" held in Bhopal in July 2025. The Baithak brought together prominent figures from Madhya Pradesh's political and cultural spheres for dialogue on governance, development and regional issues. Speakers included Chief Minister Dr. Mohan Yadav, BJP State President Hemant Khandelwal, Urban Development Minister Kailash Vijayvargiya, Leader of Opposition Umang Singhar, Deputy Chief Minister Rajendra Shukla, Sports and Cooperation Minister Vishvas Sarang and OBC and Minorities Minister Krishna Gaur, alongside senior Congress leaders, Olympic hockey bronze medallist Vivek Sagar and poets Jani Bairagi and Mahendra Madhur.

Khandekar described the Baithak as reflecting the platform's commitment to amplifying voices from Madhya Pradesh's political and cultural fabric and creating spaces where policy connects with people through credible digital journalism.

Position in India's Regional Digital News Market

MP Tak competes in a crowded Hindi digital-news space where regional players — News18 Madhya Pradesh, ETV Bharat Madhya Pradesh, Zee Madhya Pradesh/Chhattisgarh and Dainik Bhaskar's digital editions — vie for the same audiences. Its differentiation lies in the digital-first DNA inherited from the Tak network and the distribution muscle of the India Today Group.

The regional Tak websites — including Gujarat Tak, Mumbai Tak, UP Tak, Rajasthan Tak and MP Tak — collectively represent the group's bet that Indian news consumption is fragmenting into state-specific, language-first feeds, and that national broadcast brands alone cannot hold mobile audiences without dedicated regional destinations.

Parent Organisation: India Today Group

The India Today Group, headquartered in Noida, is among India's largest and most diversified media companies. Founded in 1975 with the India Today magazine, it now spans television (Aaj Tak, India Today, Good News Today), print, radio and digital properties. The group also operates the TAK channels and The Lallantop, the latter a Hindi digital platform known for explainers and satirical commentary.

MP Tak benefits from this ecosystem through shared reporting resources, editorial infrastructure and cross-promotion, while maintaining its own distinct identity as a Madhya Pradesh-first brand.

MP Tak distributes content through its website at mptak.in, its YouTube channel and its pages on major social media platforms. The platform's social handles, including facebook.com/mptakofficial and @mptakofficial on X (Twitter), extend its reach beyond the website. For readers in Madhya Pradesh seeking the latest Hindi news from the state, the official website remains the primary destination: https://www.mptak.in.

The Tak Channel Ecosystem

MP Tak sits within a large family of digital-first channels that the India Today Group built over several years. The Tak bouquet eventually comprised 18 channels: News Tak, Sports Tak, Crime Tak, Bharat Tak, Biz Tak, UP Tak, Bihar Tak, Life Tak, Sahitya Tak, Fit Tak, Mumbai Tak, MP Tak, Astro Tak, Dilli Tak, Rajasthan Tak, Gujarat Tak, Punjab Tak and Haryana Tak. Together, the Tak channels amassed more than 44 million subscribers and around 9 billion views annually across social media platforms, which group executives described as making Tak the biggest consumption destination in the news genre by views and subscriptions.

The strategy behind the network was explicit: having gathered enormous audiences on YouTube and Facebook, the group decided to move its channels to owned destinations with content differentiation, personalisation and better engagement. MP Tak's website was one of the later steps in that migration, following the same path taken by its sibling regional brands.

Madhya Pradesh: The Political Backdrop

MP Tak reports on one of India's most politically significant Hindi-heartland states. Madhya Pradesh sends 29 members to the Lok Sabha and has 230 assembly seats, making its politics a national bellwether. The state has been governed by the BJP for most of the period since 2003, with the Congress holding power briefly after the 2018 assembly elections before returning to opposition.

Following the 2023 assembly elections, Dr. Mohan Yadav became the state's Chief Minister, succeeding Shivraj Singh Chouhan — the same leader who had inaugurated MP Tak's website earlier that year. For a state-focused digital outlet, tracking the new government's administrative decisions, cabinet reshuffles, welfare schemes and the opposition's responses provides the core of its daily news agenda.

Audience, Reach and the Future of Regional Digital News

MP Tak's audience is the Hindi-reading, mobile-first population of Madhya Pradesh — students, job aspirants, farmers, traders and government employees who increasingly get their news from phones rather than newspapers or television bulletins. The platform's mix of breaking video, explainers, web stories and hyper-local district reporting is designed to serve this audience across the full arc of their news day.

As India's digital advertising market matures and regional-language audiences continue to grow faster than English ones, state-focused digital brands like MP Tak are positioned at the centre of the next phase of Indian news consumption — one where the state, not the nation, is the primary unit of the news product.